Easy Meat (24 page)

Sometimes Lynn would turn her head and look at the therapist when either of them spoke, but more’ usually she stared ahead, following the slowly shifting kaleidoscope of clouds.

“So, Lynn, how are we today? How have you been since we last met?”

Always the same opening gambit, and always a pause, which seemed to her unnaturally long, before Lynn could bring herself to answer. So aware of the delicate ground on which she might be beginning to tread. “Fine. I’ve been fine. At least, I thought so.”

“D’you want to tell me what’s happened? What’s caused you to change your mind?”

Petra Carey was, Lynn guessed, in her early thirties, not so very much older than Lynn herself, although, without perhaps meaning to, she made Lynn feel young, younger. Lynn was sure the room had something to do with it, that feeling of being summoned there; it reminded her of when she had been at school, the situation more than the room itself. Those occasions when she had been found wanting: you know, Lynn Kellogg, we expected better of you than this.

While Lynn framed her answer, the therapist waited patiently, her only jewelry the broad wedding ring on her left hand.

“The case I’ve recently started working on,” Lynn said finally. “The policeman who was just killed. It’s that. To do with that.”

Petra nodded. “Go on.”

Lynn told her about visiting the victim’s family with Resnick and Margaret Aston’s reactions—her anger, the way even that had seemed controlled. And the daughter, Stella, telling them how she had wanted to join the police when she’d been younger; follow, Lynn supposed, in her father’s footsteps. But it had been Resnick whom she had asked. And now she was studying forestry, the daughter, agriculture, pining to go off and do things with trees.

Unusually, Petra Carey smiled.

“What?”

“Nothing, no, go on.”

“But what’s so funny?”

“Nothing’s funny.”

“Then why are you laughing?”

“I was smiling.”

“What at?”

Touching her ring, forefinger and thumb, Petra Carey turned it around on her hand. “There’s so much there, in that story.”

“Tell me,” Lynn said.

But the therapist shook her head. “That’s not the way it goes.”

And once Lynn had begun to talk, think it through as she spoke, she thought she could see why Petra Carey had been amused. It was all there, much of it, the things that had been worrying her. Niggling away. Undermining her ever since the time she had been held prisoner by that sick bastard; the first time he had spoken to her directly, after leaving the hospital in which her father was being treated for cancer. Her father who she had feared was dying. And here was Bill Aston, near enough her father’s age, beaten to a pulp and leaving his wife and family to manage. Wife and daughter. The daughter who wanted to be a policewoman. “Oh, Lynnie!” Lynn remembered her own mother’s disapproving cry. “No. No, please no.” And, unlike Stella Aston, she had done it anyway, gone ahead and joined. And her father had got sick and now he was in remission. Lynn and her mother waiting, not saying, waiting for the cancer to come back.

“Yes,” Petra Carey said once Lynn had finished speaking, “of course, you’re right. It’s no wonder it troubled you, all those similarities, echoes. Your fears about your father’s health; that he might die and leave you. The guilt that persists about going against their wishes and joining the police, as if somehow that has contributed to your father’s illness.”

They had talked about that before, over and over, around and around—Lynn’s sense of guilt. The therapist trying to maneuver her into seeing her father’s cancer was not her doing, there was no cause and effect. His sickness was not in Lynn’s gift, not in her control.

“What else is there?” Petra Carey asked. Faint, from outside, electronic sound, drifting and melodic: one of the other therapists, she had explained, liked to use music with his patients, to have them lie on the couch, eyes closed, and think themselves back into the womb.

“What do you mean,” Lynn asked, “what else?”

No reply: not quite silently, the clock continued to tick round. Fifty minutes, it wasn’t long. At least, for maybe the first half it was; it seemed then as if the hand was hardly moving, as though everything had slowed almost to a halt. And then the final twenty minutes seemed to race. Always. Burdened by the pressure to say something, Lynn sometimes froze.

“What else,” Petra Carey said, “do these two stories have in common? This man whose death you’re investigating and your own. Is there a common factor we haven’t talked about?”

“I suppose you mean
him
, don’t you? My boss. That’s what you’re driving at.” Lynn was close to anger now, a pinch of color in her cheeks.

“Inspector Resnick.”

Lynn looked away.

“The daughter,” Petra Carey asked, “Stella, I think you said. What’s her relationship to Resnick in this story you’ve told me?”

“I suppose she looked up to him. I mean, he’s the one she asked about the police, not her father. Even though her father’s a policeman.”

“And why do you think that might have been?”

Shaking her head, Lynn smiled; just a little, around the eyes. “Because he’s her father. She sees him all the time. He’s always there. Ordinary.”

“And Charlie Resnick?”

“He’s different. He’s from outside. More, oh, I don’t know, glamorous, I suppose you could say. Not so everyday.”

“But he and her father, they were roughly the same age?”

“Round about.”

“And Stella was how old?”

“Eleven, twelve.”

“You think she could have had a crush on him?”

“Oh, now look.” Alert, Lynn leaned forward in her chair, looking at the therapist directly.

“Yes?”

“I know what you’re trying to get me to say.”

“What’s that?”

“Listen, I’m not eleven or twelve.”

A small shrug of the therapist’s shoulders, a disarming smile.

“And I don’t have a crush on my boss. That’s so stupid. It’s not like that. It’s not like that at all.”

“All right,” Petra Carey said encouragingly. “What is it like?”

“It’s not like anything.”

The clock showed there were only two minutes to go; it was one of Petra’s rules, she never overran.

“I don’t see,” Lynn was saying, “why it always has to keep coming back to this.”

“It was your story.” The therapist smiled quietly. “It was what you wanted to talk about today.”

She was on her feet now. The session was over. But Lynn continued to look at her, stubbornly, from her chair. “It was because of my dad, because I’m afraid of him dying. That’s what made me think about it. That’s why.”

“I know that. That’s clear.”

“Well, then?”

The therapist was standing by the door, looking pointedly at the clock. Anger and distress were clear on Lynn’s face and in the way she rose reluctantly from the chair and reached for her bag and coat.

“In your story,” Petra Carey said, “the daughter, for whatever the reason, might not be able to express her love for her father, all of her love, so she offers it to his friend instead. A man who’s like her father, an idealized version of her father. It’s part of the normal pattern of growing up. Growing away. Little girls love their fathers. Usually, then, they replace them with other men. Because once you reach a certain age, that love of the father, part of that love, is associated with guilt. Society considers it inappropriate. But if that other man, the man to whom she, the girl, wants to give her love, is too much like her father, she may fall prey to the same taboo. What she ends up feeling is guilt. And guilt is a destructive feeling. It eats away at us from the inside, makes it impossible for us to act.”

There were people moving around on the stairs outside. Lynn walked past the therapist towards the open door.

“I’ll see you at the same time next week,” Petra Carey said. “If you need to get in touch with me beforehand, please ring.”

The music, wherever it had been coming from, had stopped. Part-way down the carpeted stairs, Lynn swung her head. The door to the therapist’s room was already closed.

Twenty-nine

Hannah had devised strategies so as not to think about him, this big, bulky man with the sad eyes. That day, at work, it had not been too hard. The demands of thirty adolescents at a time, so often eager for anything but learning, failed to allow her much space for personal daydreaming. Her attempts to draw Nicky’s former classmates into a discussion on gender politics, based around Lady Macbeth’s cry of “unsex me now,” had foundered disastrously. But when, discussing with her sixth-form group one of her favorite Jayne Anne Phillips stories, in which a former dancer visits her dying father, she found herself thinking, not about the restraint and control in the writing, but the surprising grace with which Resnick could walk across a room, she knew, restraint or not, she was going to call him the first chance she got. And when what she got was Lynn Kellogg’s peremptory voice informing her that the inspector was busy and he would try to call her back later, Hannah thought it no more than she deserved.

Whatever had happened to cool?

Back home, she watered the tubs of flowers and the hanging baskets in the backyard, pulled a few weeds away from around the shrubs which were newly planted along one side of her small front garden, and considered cutting the grass; finally she brought out a mug of peppermint tea and the lemon cream biscuits she had bought on the way home, and sat on her front step, sweater round her shoulders, reading Marge Piercy. She found herself feeling so fiercely angry at the efforts the central character was prepared to make to hang onto a husband forever having affairs with younger women, that she forgot to ask herself if anger wasn’t precisely what Piercy wanted her to feel.

When the phone called her indoors, a part of her sang with a sweet degree of expectation, but it was only her mother and when the two women had talked long enough for Hannah to realize she was no longer listening, had not really heard anything her mother had said for at least five minutes, she made an excuse and hung up.

She took a ready-to-heat mushroom bake from the freezer and slid it into the microwave. Pouring herself a glass of wine, she began to make a list of all those fiddling little jobs she would do that evening, another of all the friends she should call.

Considering what it had cost, the wine was surprisingly good. The mushroom bake, as usual, was fine. Wanting some bread to go with it, and regretting that she had forgotten to stop for bread on the way home—the biscuits had come from her corner shop, but the bread they stocked was pre-sliced and not worth considering—she found some oatcakes in the back of the cupboard, carefully enough wrapped that they had not lost all their bite.

The first two people she called were seemingly out and Hannah declined their invitation to speak after the tone; the third one was engaged, the fourth had for some reason been disconnected. In the living room she channel-hopped for all of five minutes before switching off. It was either too late or too early to take a bath. She would do some more reading, listen to the stereo. The way she was behaving was extraordinary: all right, she had slept with the man once but it had not exactly been like Paul on the way to Damascus. No startling revelations, no blinding lights. Just competent, almost comfortable sex. She remembered to switch off the Gregson and Collister CD before it got to “Last Man Alive,” but then realized she had listened three times in succession to “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You”—not the old original version by some pop group she vaguely remembered from when she was a child, but this new one, bluegrass, sung by Alison Krauss. Now that I’ve found you, dum, de-dum, dum, dum, da-dum, gonna build my life around you. Madness, Hannah was certain, that way comes. Time for a slow, hot bath and an early bed.

She was tipping in the peach and honey cream foam when the phone rang again.

“Oh,” Hannah said, flushing, “it’s you.” And, “Yes, okay.” And, “You want to come here?” And, “No, no, half an hour would be fine. Till then, okay, goodbye.”

God, Hannah, she thought, checking the temperature of the water before slipping in, are you a cinch or what?

In the event it was just short of the hour by the time Resnick’s cab had dropped him off near the entrance to the recreation ground and he had walked along the shrouded strip of unmade road, once again past the house where Mary Sheppard had died. So many parts of this city from which Resnick now averted his eyes without ever being able to shut the images from his mind.

The front door to Hannah’s house was open and his adrenaline immediately began pumping, sensing an intruder, a burglary, something worse. But, no, it was only Hannah, shooing a ginger cat along the narrow hallway, the animal pausing on the front step to look back at her balefully, ears flat to its head.

“Not yours, I take it?”

Hannah made a show of shuddering. “Can’t stand them, I’m afraid. That one especially.” Taking in Resnick while she was talking, the effort he had made to look informal, pale-blue shirt, the top two buttons unfastened, light-gray trousers, a dark tweedy jacket that had seen better days. “I woke up one night, not so long ago, that wretched animal must have sneaked in somehow and stayed—anyway, I heard this sound, just light, you know, but like someone else in the room, breathing, and there it was, stretched out on the bed next to me, paws right out, fast asleep.”

“Some people,” Resnick said, “would consider that an honor.” It didn’t come out sounding exactly the way it was meant, but like some corny line, the kind he could imagine coming from someone like Divine. “The cat, I mean,” Resnick said, trying to retrieve the situation, “it must have felt comfortable, trusted you.”

“Yes, well, when it comes to who’s sharing my bed,” Hannah said, “I like to do the choosing myself.”

Resnick bent towards the animal, which was sitting there cleaning itself, unconcerned. Watching him stroke the cat’s head, Hannah imagined him wearing one of those loose linen suits, creased and a little baggy, cream colored, or, no, stone; that was it, stone.

She gave a wry smile. “You obviously don’t feel the same way? About cats?”