The Hunger Trace (20 page)

She woke an hour later to find him sitting next to her. ‘Oh shit,’ she said.

‘New motor?’ he said.

‘It’s a courtesy car,’ she said, unable to look at him.

‘Well you’re not being very fucking courteous with it, are you?’

She had a bitter taste in her mouth. She looked at him, feeling the same toppling attraction as she had that night at her house. He was quiet, his breathing quick and shallow. ‘This isn’t what it looks like,’ she said, but even as she spoke she felt herself leaning towards him.

‘I don’t even want to say what it looks like,’ he said, but his voice was quiet.

They kissed and then stopped, Louisa glancing around, seeing kids come out of a nearby school. She looked back over at the house he had just come from, and shook her head.

‘You were quick,’ she said, their faces still close. Louisa was frightened of picking up the scent of another woman.

‘You must’ve been asleep for ages,’ he said. He kissed her again.

The disgust she felt had become so mixed with arousal that she could no longer tell them apart. ‘What was she like?’ Louisa asked.

‘She’s nice.’

Louisa wanted to hit him. ‘I see,’ she said.

‘I’m biased, mind. She’s my sister.’

‘Right,’ Louisa said, relieved, and then appalled with herself.

‘She gets mate’s rates.’

Louisa sighed. He put his hand on the back of her neck, and she heard the unfamiliar vehicle adjusting to their movements.

‘I couldn’t get a spare car, on my insurance,’ Adam said. ‘Can you give me a lift home?’

She nodded.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You know the way.’

Louisa had often wondered about the inside of his house, imagining the earthy smell of football boots and an overflowing bin, a big plasma TV and an unpleasant glass table. She was right about the TV, but the place was tastefully done, if a little sparse. He had clearly bought wrecked wooden furniture and worked it up himself. His coffee table was a school desk with the legs cut off, the drawers still intact. There was a nautical feel to the lounge: a barometer, pebbles and shells, and a caged light on the table, which looked like something from an old boat. ‘You do know that Derbyshire contains the most landlocked inch of Britain, right?’ she said.

‘Aye. Exactly. That stuff reminds me of me holidays.’

A few small family pictures stood discreetely on the bookshelf. In one, a young Adam sat with his mother and sister on a Spanish beach, drinking from a glass bottle of 7UP that was as big as his arm. His skin was darker, but the facial expression was unmistakable – the lips pursed as though he had narrowly avoided some catastrophe. Louisa turned to see him wearing that same expression now. ‘Will you stay for a cuppa?’ he said.

The afternoon faded fast into that sad hinterland, but he did not bother to turn on the lights. They made love against the door jamb, one foot in the living room, one in the hall. Without alcohol the pleasure was more shocking, their bodies colder but no less willing. They ended up lying on the carpet, his stomach glistening like glass in the almost dark. After a few moments, he turned on the boat lamp and she suddenly remembered what the window looked like from the street.

She asked him about his sister. He said it was the usual thing: he visited Sophie to hear news of those family members who no longer spoke to him. ‘Bit a joy, bit a torture.’ He hadn’t been back to the family home in Belton for ten years.

‘Because of your job?’ Louisa asked.

‘No. They don’t know about that. Other stuff.’

Sophie knew about his evening work, and she didn’t really want him around her children. She never said it, but he could tell. ‘As if I’d pimp them out or sommat.’

Louisa pulled a blanket down from the sofa and covered them both. ‘How did you get into this job?’ she asked him.

‘Careers Advisor.’

She cuffed his head. ‘Seriously.’

‘Just fell into it, really.’

‘Oh, come on.’

‘I’m serious. I had a thing with this lass. Just a thing, like. Sex, you know?’

Good God, Louisa thought. Just his saying the word was enough to cause that feeling in her stomach.

‘Anyway, that finished, but she rings me a few months later and says it’s her mate’s birthday the next week and they’d had a whip round. Asked me if I could do oat. She laid it on thick, like. Said I was dead good in sack.’

‘Well,’ Louisa said.

‘Said they’d raised two hundred pounds. Couldn’t believe it. I was skint. Birthday girl’d had a bad run, apparently.’

‘That was the first one?’

‘Aye. Grew from there.’

‘Did you –
do
you – advertise?’

‘No. None of that. It’s all word of mouth.’

‘Which is the title of your new movie, I suppose,’ she said.

‘You what? Oh aye. Them kind of jokes are an occupational hazard. Fortunately I’m not too swift on the uptake.’

‘Mmm. Uptake.’

He laughed.

‘Can I ask another question?’ she said.

‘Aye, go on. As you’re in your stride.’

‘Do you take drugs?’

He frowned. She had offended him again. ‘No. I don’t touch any a that shit.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m just trying to work out why you—’

‘I’ve got a kid, an’t I? From when I were young. Send most of the money to her mam.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘It’s nothing I meant to hide. I don’t usually tell folk.’

She tried to pick through the layers of that remark for a moment. ‘Where are they now?’

‘Out west.’

‘
Out west?
’

‘Aye. Shropshire somewhere.’

Louisa laughed for a second and then stopped. ‘Sorry. Do you see her at all? The child?’

‘Nope.’

‘That must be—’

‘Way it goes, in’t it. I might not be there, but me money’s there.’

‘How old is she?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘My God. You can’t be much older than that yourself.’

‘Oh, I’m at least twice that age,’ he said.

His life began to open up to Louisa. She could imagine his parents’ house in Belton – the damp mossy stone, the tidiness of the rooms, the smell of apples in the kitchen, the thin walls.

He took a cushion from the sofa, lifted her head from the carpet, slid the cushion underneath. He turned to face her. ‘What’s going on with you and your neighbour, then?’ he asked. Louisa felt her eyes widen. She sat up.

‘Why, what did she say?’

‘She never said oat.’

‘I thought you didn’t talk about other clients. You didn’t tell her about this, did you?’ She was aware of shouting the last few words, but Adam remained calm.

‘No. And she’s not my client any more.’

‘Really?’

‘She stopped it. It was four or five weeks. That’s all. I knew it would be.’

Louisa let her head fall gradually back on the cushion. ‘What did you think of her?’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘Looked like she was feeling bad about herself. Oftentimes I see people in that state.’

‘She’s grieving.’

‘What happened?’

‘Lots of stuff.’

‘You seemed quite eager to get one over on her.’

‘I was looking out for her.’

‘No you weren’t.’

Louisa was quiet. ‘She was my friend.’ It hurt to say it, and she felt, with panic, that she might cry.

‘What did you fall out over?’

She did not have the heart to tell him. She hadn’t spoken to Maggie for weeks now, and she couldn’t imagine doing so after this, but there had been no confrontation. ‘I can’t even remember. Do you think it’s only going to be four or five weeks with me?’

He shook his head. ‘Different. Completely different thing.’

She thought of Maggie and Adam together, as she had seen them that night. The vigour and eagerness of them. She felt the blood move inside her. She felt sick. It was tough to hold on to the tears. ‘I want you to tell me what it was like with her,’ she said.

‘No you don’t.’

‘That good, eh?’

‘Didn’t say that.’

‘She had this mark on her neck. It was a love-bite, wasn’t it? It was you.’ Louisa remembered watching Maggie from the doorway of her bathroom. The cold light and the discolouration on her skin.

‘You don’t want to talk about this. It’s not your thing, and I’m not fucking telling you, anyway.’

She nodded and turned away. ‘I’ve managed to piss you off as well, haven’t I?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t get away that easy.’

Adam stood just inside the automatic doors at Morrison’s and listened to them opening and closing behind him. His trousers were covered with a pelt of wet grass. He was tired, but he didn’t care, because Louisa was coming for an early supper. They had spent almost every night together for the past two weeks.

He marched the aisles, picked up the ingredients for steak sauce. At the meat counter he chose a couple of rib-eyes. He turned away to sneeze. ‘You allergic to grass?’ the assistant from the meat counter said, looking at his work clothes.

‘Aye. A bit.’

‘Looks like you’re in the wrong game,’ the assistant said.

‘You’re probably right,’ Adam said.

His mother had worked in a supermarket. He remembered once, when he was eight years old, that she had slipped on some spilt oil at work and broken her arm. Adam had been mute for three days. His mother had raised him with passion and care, but she had always had the power to destroy him with a single sentence. Emotionally annihilate him. Once, in his teens, she caught him talking dirty to a girl on the phone, and lost her rag. ‘If you start getting into all
that
at your age, you’ll never find out what else you’re good at.’ They both had a fair handle on the future, powerless as they were to influence it.

Belton, where he grew up, was a town of fine lines. Arkwright’s Mill – a World Heritage Site – was just down the road. It was the home of the Industrial Revolution, the catalyst for the modern world, but half of the current population didn’t have a job. When Adam was young, most of the unemployed lived on St Mark’s Estate, down by the colourworks, where the brook sometimes ran pink. Most of them took smack. But it didn’t have to be that way. Adam’s father had a job, and Adam himself could have followed his old man into construction.

Now, in the supermarket, he felt the cold of the giant refrigerators. The beeps and pips from the checkout sounded like a life-support machine. The hollow sound of these places always made him remember.

At fifteen, he had failed to heed his parents’ warnings about the older girl who worked on the checkout with his mother. When he had thought about the trouble he could find on St Mark’s Estate, putting his hand up some lass’s NafCo 54 sweatshirt seemed like the soft option, and he’d be damned if he’d spend his life wringing it out over the blonde one from
Roseanne
.

‘I’m late,’ she had said, meeting him outside the shops.

‘No you’re not. We said half past.’

It had been an honest mistake, and he’d felt sorry for the girl. He had promised to pay for the child, and he was a man of his word. He recalled sitting in the waiting room during one of the early appointments, staring at the green Nike Air Max he had received for his fifteenth birthday (he knew how hard his parents had saved to get them). The girl’s grandparents had come over from Shropshire, and everyone was shaking their heads and casting glances in his direction. He had expected there to be tests in life, but he had not expected the final exam to come so early, or that his failure would be so irredeemable in the eyes of others.

These days, his wages from the Golf Club went towards child maintenance, and he used the money he made from his night job to pay the rest, and cover his own bills. He hadn’t accepted an appointment, however, for two weeks. He reached for some broccoli, but decided to go up-market, and chose asparagus instead.

The last time Adam had seen his daughter, she was four months old. Her name was Elizabeth, although he had once heard her mother call her Lizzie on the telephone. He had thought of her a lot more since meeting Louisa. Of course, he had always thought of her, but now he allowed those thoughts to linger.

When he spoke to Louisa, told her stories, he could make her laugh under her breath. He knew that took a special sort of skill. Sometimes, when he was on a roll and she was laughing easily, he opened his mouth with this great wish to say something else, to tell her something he could be proud of. He wanted to talk about his daughter. But he knew nothing about her, and so had nothing else to say. He didn’t even know what a Shropshire accent was like.

The picture in his mind was of a tall, sensible girl with her mother’s features. Perhaps she would look him up one day. The thought made him more anxious than excited – it only seemed to strike when he was leaving the house of a client. She would be disappointed if they met, but he knew that in all likelihood they would continue to live eighty miles apart, without contact, and clever Lizzie would probably despise the idea of him without any details to confirm her instincts. That, perhaps, was the best he could hope for.