Offcomer (19 page)

“Oh. Right.” Claire hesitated. “That’s great.”

So that was it. Jen had fallen in love. She had fallen in love with Tom, and had decided to stay. Tom was an artist. He made
her happy. It was unexpected turn of events, but not impossible: it kind of made sense. Claire picked up her glass, took another mouthful of beer, swallowed. The liquid seemed to go solid in her throat.

“So you didn’t go to Birmingham, then?” she asked. “Didn’t fancy it after all?”

“Oh no, I went.”

“Oh,” Claire said. “Right.” She paused, reconsidered, shuffling her thoughts around again. “You’ve got some time off then? Up to see Tom, just helping out around the place here?”

“Nope. Packed it in. Never going back.”

Claire looked at her pint glass, reached out to set it more centrally on the beermat. Soon as it seemed like she’d got a grip, everything shifted sideways.

“You’ll be off travelling before long, then?” she tried, after a moment. “Going together? You always fancied heading off into the wide blue yonder …”

“No. We’re staying here. At least for the foreseeable.” Jennifer pressed her cigarette down into the ashtray’s notch, pushed her tobacco pouch across to Claire. “Sorry. D’you want one?”

“Aye,” Claire said, reaching out for it. “Why not.”

“ ‘Aye’?” Jennifer said. “I’ve never heard you say ‘Aye’ before.”

“I must have picked it up in Belfast.” Claire tugged a paper out of its cardboard envelope, began teasing out tobacco along its length.

“Bollocks. That’s local. You know that’s local.”

“It’s Belfast.”

“It’s from round here. You’re just being contrary. Learning to speak Lancashire when you’re blatantly living in Ireland.”

“You’re no better. Ever since you went off to college. Your
accent’s all over the place.” Claire lifted the paper, began rolling it between her fingers.

“That time in Birmingham didn’t help,” Jennifer said, and sucked carefully on her cigarette. She paused to pick a shred of tobacco off the tip of her tongue. “When I started in November, just in time for the Christmas rush, I was sharing a flat with four Londoners. What with that and the customers all speaking Brummie, I kind of lost it. The accent, I mean.”

“You must have been having a great time,” Claire said.

Jennifer pouted, gave a half-shrug. “It was hard work. The place stayed open till three, then we had to tidy up afterwards. Stack all the chairs and tables so the cleaners could do the floors when they came in first thing. It’d be going four before we finished. Then we’d have a few beers, smoke a joint. Head home around six. Go to bed, sleep all day, get up in time to go to work. I didn’t see daylight for three months.”

Claire felt her smile go fixed and twitchy. She glanced down at her hands, watched her fingertips as they rolled the cigarette. “But you had a laugh,” she said, lifting the narrow cylinder to her mouth to moisten the glue. “You had loads of friends. You enjoyed yourself. You had a great time.”

“I couldn’t settle. I felt lost.”

Claire’s smile stiffened. Her jaw clenched. Her hand, as it reached out for Jen’s lighter, looked odd and unfamiliar.

“Birmingham’s a big place,” she suggested.

“And ugly as fuck. Not that I ever saw it. Not by daylight.” Jennifer paused, took a deep drink. “I did have friends.”

Claire scraped a flame from the lighter, drew on the cigarette. Tobacco tendrils glowed, shrivelled in the flame. The smoke hit her lungs. She shivered.

“Because the club was new, we all started work there
around the same time. So we were all kind of in the same boat. Most of us new in town, just out of university. And I was sharing the flat with work people, so we got to know each other quite quickly. But it was still kind of lonely. Everyone had their own thing going on. Everyone was kind of fighting their own corner, somehow. Nothing seemed reliable, or permanent. Well, it wasn’t, was it? I’m back here now.”

“You needed a break. You missed Tom,” Claire said.

Jennifer settled back, narrowed her eyes at the ceiling.

She hadn’t missed him at first, she said. She was so busy, and for a while, there was someone else, one of the bouncers at the club. But it didn’t last, and when they broke up, it was pretty difficult. They still had to work together, and she had to try very hard not to notice when he picked up girls at the club.

She hurt her back, lifting a stack of chairs. It got so bad that for a while she could hardly sleep. And she had stopped eating. At first, it was just there was no time to cook, no time to eat. Then she started throwing up anything she did manage to get down her. Which was mostly toast. Worst thing, she said, in the world, throwing up toast. Revolting. She didn’t think she could ever eat toast again.

With her back gone, she was useless at work, so she took a week off sick, and came home, and slept for two days solid. The third day, when she got up, her back was a little less sore, a little looser. But she didn’t know what to do with herself. She felt twitchy, nervy; she couldn’t settle. She decided to go and see Tom. Up at the cottage he invited her in, made her a cup of coffee and they sat in front of his fire. They got on really well. Much better than over the summer. She had, she said, been a bit of an arsehole over the summer. All that crap
about freedom and independence and her big plans. She spent the rest of the week with him. Did a lot of walking, as much as she could with her bad back. In the evening she’d lie on his hearth-rug with her back to the fire. The warmth seemed to help. At the end of the week she had to go back down to Birmingham. It was horrible. She was no sooner back than she started being sick again.

They’d arranged that he would come down to visit sometime the following month. It was rough, she said, thinking she wouldn’t see him for so long. Turned out he couldn’t handle it either. She got home from work early that Saturday morning and he was there, asleep on the sofa. One of the girls had let him in, he’d dropped off waiting up for her. It was like an extra Christmas, she said. She just leapt on him. She couldn’t help herself.

They hardly slept that night. Talking, mostly. Her back was too sore to do much else. The next day she was exhausted and her back was killing her. She was almost ready to cry. She couldn’t face getting up, couldn’t take any more painkillers. Couldn’t really do anything much but lie in bed, trying not to whimper. Then Tom said he was just going out for a bit. She assumed he was going for cigarettes, or a paper, or maybe just to get a break from her. She lay there, thinking how pissed off he must be, coming all the way down to see her and all she could do was lie in bed and moan. I’m crap, she thought, I’m no fun at all. If I were him, I’d be bored too. If I were him, I’d dump me.

“He came back about ten minutes later. He stood there in the doorway, with a hot water bottle in his hand. He’d gone out and bought it. He’d filled it for me. He was looking round for something to wrap it in. You know, so it wouldn’t scald
me. All my towels were wet, my clothes were all in a heap on the floor, all damp and smelly. You know what I’m like. So he took off his shirt. He took off his shirt and he wrapped it round the hot water bottle and held it against my back. He stroked my hair. And then, when the heat had taken the stiffness out a bit, he pulled my T-shirt up and began, ever so gently, to stroke my back. He sat like that for an hour. Gently massaging my back. I handed my notice in that night. I came back up here soon as I could.”

“But you’re not staying,” Claire said, urgently. “You’ve got plans. You’ll be off to London, or travelling, or something.”

“I don’t think I could leave now, even if I wanted to,” Jennifer said. “I’ve only just got myself back together. Things had got pretty bad, down in Birmingham. I don’t want to risk losing it like that again. I’d started breaking glasses at work. Deliberately. Started cutting myself with the glass.” Jennifer held out her hand. Across the ball of her left thumb was a series of parallel pale lines. “I always said it was an accident,” she added. “No one seemed to notice I always cut myself in the same place. I guess they were all too busy with their own stuff.”

Claire, looking down at the brown hand, at the pale scars, felt the floor lurch under her feet, felt the ancient wall behind her buckle and sway. She put her hands down flat on the table, either side of her pint. She closed her eyes.

This is wrong, she thought. This is immeasurably, irredeemably wrong.

She breathed deeply, opened her eyes. Jennifer was still looking down at the ball of her thumb.

“Stupid, really, but I felt guilty as well,” she was saying. “Really angry with myself. For being so self-indulgent. When
you come down to it, it’s really just attention-seeking. I was lonely. I wanted someone to notice. If I’m honest, that’s what it was. Nothing more.”

Claire looked at Jennifer’s bent face, the open pores on her nose, the faint lines traced from nostrils to lips, the faint lines radiating from the crooks of her eyes across her temples. Suddenly, she was flooded with relief.

She had been wrong, she realised. She had made a mistake. This was not Jen. She did not sound like Jen, she did not even, when it came down to it, look like Jen. Jen’s skin was peach-smooth, perfect. Jen was confident, unassailable. So this was definitely, she thought, not Jen. This was, in fact, nothing like her.

“Listen,” Claire said. “I’ll have to head on.”

Jennifer looked up.

“Where you going?”

Claire slid out from between the table and the settle.

“I don’t know.”

“Stay, then.”

“No. I can’t. I have to go.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine.”

“I’m glad you’re back. I’ve been missing you.”

Claire shivered.

“Yeah well,” she said. “I’m not staying.”

EIGHT
 

Claire worked most nights. She collected glasses, emptied ashtrays, and on Friday nights she served the food. Her feet hurt her and sometimes she burnt herself on the serving-dishes and usually a cut wept discreetly on her ankle. Mostly it was end-of-the-evening work, so she was there until after the bar had closed. Afterwards, she would walk back up to the flat. There were always taxis available for the staff, but she rarely took one; she was never in any rush to get back. There was often an invitation to come back to someone’s house for a drink, but she never went. She couldn’t help suspecting that even though Alan was always asleep when she got in, he would somehow know if she came home any later than usual. She couldn’t face the explanations, the argument, the silence that would necessarily follow. And anyway, if she did go, what would she say. She had got out of the habit of conversation. On the whole,
it seemed easiest just to go back to the flat. So she would walk alone up the Dublin Road, up Botanic Avenue, and then down Wolseley Street to their front door. It was a cold walk. The streets were always almost empty. She never felt scared. She would get back around two-thirty, three. The flat was always cold when she got in. She would pull off her shoes at the door, fill the kettle, then switch on the electric fire. With a cup of black tea cooling in her hand she would curl up on the sofa, trying to gather her nerve. Three paces through to the dark bedroom, climb over Alan’s sleeping body and into bed. Sleep. She rarely managed it. Usually she was woken when Alan flicked the light on and the fire off in the morning. The room would be parched and airless. It was like burning money, he said, leaving the fire on all night like that. So the first word she said every morning was, “Sorry.”

Once he had showered, breakfasted and gone to work, she would haul a blanket out of the airing cupboard and curl up again on the sofa. She didn’t like to go through to the bedroom. The bed would be crumpled, cool and damp. There would be pale curling hairs on the sheets.

She would sleep until lunchtime. When she woke, stiff and cold, she would change into yesterday’s clothes, pull on her thickest jumper, then head out. She would walk into every second-hand shop on Botanic Avenue, leafing through every close-packed rail of old-smelling clothes. She had left her coat behind in England. She had to replace it, but couldn’t find one she could really afford. They all seemed to be very expensive. Ten pounds, more or less, and she never had that much cash to spare. Her money never seemed even to last the week. There were always bills, there was always food to buy. And Alan was strictly fair in the division of costs. They split everything fifty-fifty, even though, as he pointed out, she used the electric
more than he did. Eventually she would give up looking and go to the Spar instead to buy something for their tea. She was never entirely disappointed that she hadn’t found a coat. If she had managed to buy one, she would, she realised, then have to find something else to do with her afternoons.

By half-four, as she returned to the cold flat with her green-white-and-red plastic carrier bag, the afternoon would be fading into grey, tainted by the foreshadow of Alan coming home. There was only an hour between his arrival back at the flat and her departure for work, and he hated that hour. Claire knew he hated it. His irritation showed in every inch of his body. Every night as she served his dinner, he sat at the kitchen table rubbing his eyes wearily, his shoulders knotted with irritation. The meal finished, he would walk through to the living room and switch on the TV. While she showered, washed her hair and put on make-up in the bathroom, he watched
News Line
. He would call through to her, from where he sat. Every evening the same thing.