Touch (7 page)

Mary held the child as he was sick into the bath. She felt his ribs convulse. A gush of vomit splashed onto the enamel. He struggled to spit out thick dribbles of saliva and his hair was damp with fever. Mary reached beyond him to turn on the taps. Water swirled into the vomit, its smell sweet and sour and cloying. She almost retched.

‘Alright now darling? Alright?'

Mark nodded dumbly, pale faced, unable to talk. Mary gave him a drink with her cupped hands. She massaged his neck.

‘Don't swallow, just spit out.'

Mark did as he was told and she wiped his face with a damp flannel. There were faint shadows under his eyes and his skin seemed thin, almost opaque. She led him back to the bed, tucking him in with a light kiss on the forehead as he snuggled down. He was seven years old and only two weeks from his next birthday.

‘Try and sleep now, darling. Ok?'

Again the weary nod and the slow drift into unconsciousness from a child who had been ill for days. She stood for a moment watching him. There was a time when he had been carefree, childish. When was it? It couldn't have been long ago, but it seemed so.

Mary went back to the bathroom where she had left the tap running and squirted a thick green liquid into the bath. She couldn't afford to get sick herself. The smell of bile and pine disinfectant was nauseating. There was a throbbing in her head. When she'd finished cleaning the bath she washed her hands then went to the bedroom and looked in at her son. He was drowsing in ragged little snores, shifting under the sheets. One hand lay next to his head, clenching and unclenching. He was dreaming some deep, feverish dream.

Mary walked out to the living room and stood at the large window. Theirs was a fifth-floor flat, one third of the way up the building. She looked down onto the rectangle of grass below, only millimetres of glass separating her from the fall. The road flowed down the hill towards the shopping centre. All the streets there were named after poets for some reason: Wordsworth Street, Keats Street, Milton Street, Browning Street. The lights were still on in the florists, showing a window display of white and yellow flowers. It was getting close to Valentine's Day. It made her want to smash something. Cars went by, cutting through slush. It was beginning to freeze again. The snow on the grass had been scuffed into heaps, leaving green scars.

The sun had dropped down behind the fields and the ink blot of woods beyond the town. The grey mass of steel mills to the north stood smokeless, silent with an eerie vigilance. Gulls steered past the window, stooping onto a paper bag that had been thrown on the grass. The first schoolchildren were beginning to make their way up the hill towards the flats and the streets that radiated from the tower block. Mark was in the third year of junior school now. Normally, he would have been one of them. Mary put out a hand and touched the window ledge. It was made of plastic, not wood. Some polymer, transformed from coal or oil. It had once been a forest. You had to remember that. She moved away from the window.

The whole flat stank of vomit and disinfectant. She had turned down the heating, but still it was too hot. It was claustrophobic. Mary fished her mobile phone out of her handbag and tried to switch it on. Dead. She'd lost the charger a few days ago, though where and how, she'd no idea. She'd turned the flat upside down, but to no avail. Now she needed to go down to the telephone in the foyer but dared not leave the boy. She waited, listening to him stir in the next room. Her neighbours began to arrive home from work. She could hear faint bass lines start up, then voices and theme music as the evening news was switched on in surrounding apartments.

It had appalled her at first, living here in the middle of a tower block with people above and below her, people on all sides. It was a hive, a matrix. Fifteen floors and four flats on each floor. Sixty apartments. But behind the maths were human lives, families. Each evening, she thought of all those minds falling into sleep, surrendering their consciousness. Then all those dreams and desires ascending to the night. Mary had taken the flat out of desperation to get away and because it was close to Mark's school. She still had to face the other mothers and what they knew. They couldn't stay here. Not much longer. In the end, they'd need help to get away. They'd need Des.

Mary went into the bedroom again and touched her hand to Mark's forehead. It seemed cooler and his snores had taken on a more regular rhythm. His eyelids were closed up like white petals. Back in the living room she paced up and down, occasionally putting up a hand to scrape back the strands of hair that had escaped from her ponytail. In each ear she wore a thin spike of jade. Her eyes were a light brown, almost amber. She stared at the crimson sunset, at lights emerging street by street. They defined the town against the coming darkness. Pulling her head from the glass she left the room and shrugged on her coat. The door of the flat clicked behind her. She went to the lift, pressing the button to bring it down. Nothing happened. There was a faint smell of washing powder out here on the landing and the air was cold. The display of lights told her that the lift was at the eighth floor.She tried again. Nothing.

For a moment she was unsure, turning back towards the flat. Then she turned again and was pelting down the stairs, pursued by a cascade of echoing footsteps.

 
Mary arrived in the foyer breathless and dizzy. Thank God there was no one on the phone. She went across to the booth and dialled the number. Her breath was harsh in the earpiece. From far away she heard the sleek, self-satisfied purring of his telephone. The booth smelled of stale cigarette smoke. The ringing went on and on. Then the receiver was lifted up and a man's voice spoke, faintly.

‘Hello?'

Mary pushed a fifty-pence piece into the slot, pressing the receiver to her ear.

‘Des?'

‘Yes?'

‘Is that Desmond?'

‘Yes. Who's speaking please? This line's really bad, I can hardly hear…'

The man's voice was hesitant, unwilling, lost in static.

‘Des, it's Mary, don't hang up, please, listen.'

There was a short silence. Her heart was sucking the air out of her chest.

‘Is it about Mark? Is he alright? If he's...'

‘Oh he's been ill, but it's not that. It's not that...'

Then the line clicked and burred, cutting her off. Mary let out a spurt of breath and half turned. She daren't try again. Shit!

 
The caretaker emerged from his office next to the entrance to the flats. He was wearing black tracksuit bottoms and a rugby shirt with green horizontal stripes, open at the neck where a tuft of blond hair showed. Then his hand was on her arm, his other hand firm in the small of her back. He took the receiver from her and replaced it.

‘Mrs Linton.'

The voice was soft, courteous, tinged by a north-east accent that could almost have been Scandinavian.

‘Steve! I can't use my mobile, so…'

The man shook his head gently and smiled, showing the tips of perfect teeth.

‘That line's faulty. I've been trying to get it seen to. Anyway, what about the boy?'

He took her arm and led her back towards the lift, always considerate.

‘I'll let you know when it's repaired. I promise.'

Mary didn't struggle. He was a short man, but stocky, and yet so light on his feet that he seemed to appear from nowhere.

 
They waited side by side as the lift came down. The lights flashed:
four, three, two, one, ground
. There was a rattle and a bump and the doors opened. The caretaker got into the lift with her. Mary caught sight of her face in the mirror. It was like looking at another woman. A woman that she'd been translated into. She looked at her expression, at the language of her face, but couldn't tell what it was trying to say. The caretaker spoke, making her start.

‘How's the boy? Better?'

There was an insinuation in his speech. Always something else behind what he said.

‘A bit, but his father should see him.'

Again that gentle shake of the head, almost imperceptible.

The lift reached the fifth floor and the doors opened with a faint hiss. The caretaker propelled her carefully into the corridor and pushed open the door of her flat.

‘I'll be up at six with some shopping for you. Are you hungry?'

Hungry? She was hungry. It surprised her. Mary nodded.

‘Look after the boy!'

With a half-salute and a faint smile he was back in the lift. Its light glistened on his thin blond hair. She saw his head from three sides in the mirrored walls, like a hologram or an exhibit in a museum. She shouldn't have told him anything. But she had.

 
The lift doors closed in a thud of rubber. Mary went into the flat and locked the door behind her. God, that smell! She paused to listen. All was quiet. Mark had not woken to find her gone. Mary was thankful for that. She went into the bedroom to check and he was sleeping peacefully, his hair plastered down where she had mopped his forehead. She half closed the door and went back to the living room, resuming her circling. Des had no way of calling her back now that her mobile was out of use. Des, the middle manager with his important career. Des, like a small boy let loose, all impulse and regret, oblivious to the hurt he was causing, to their intimacy ebbing away. In the end she could hardly bear to be near him. Especially in bed when he went to sleep at once – or pretended to – and snuffled into the pillow, unaware of everything that was leaking away from their lives. Until the leak became a flood.

They'd been married for nine years. She'd had her suspicions about other women from time to time. Usually when he harped on a woman's name or enthused about a new female colleague. She'd told herself that she was being silly. Things had drifted a bit on the physical side after Mark had been born, but she knew that wasn't unusual. They just needed a bit of time after the nappies and sleepless nights. But that time never really came. Years had passed with only the rarest acts of love. And afterwards he'd seemed almost sheepish, as if ashamed he'd let go with her, or told her he loved her. Somehow Mary thought this was normal, that it would get better, that it would change with time. That way people spent their whole lives hoping for more, when what they have is all there is. And, after all, she had Mark. She also had a degree in chemistry and a teaching certificate and she wanted to work again. One day.

Then Des had started to spend a lot of time on his laptop in the evenings, hunched in the spare bedroom after work. He was often late home. He missed meals. And he'd suddenly become more considerate, even solicitous. There were cups of tea in bed in the morning and he'd drop Mark off at school when she had her period and felt wretched. That made her wonder. She even thought he might be ill and keeping it from her. But Des wasn't the heroic type. When she asked him if everything was ok he just nodded, dropping a dry kiss on her forehead.

Then he'd given her his computer password over the phone so she could forward a file to him at work. Something he'd forgotten, something that couldn't wait. Mary was curious and it didn't feel wrong to look. She found a mail folder marked ‘Charm' and in it were dozens of emails from Des to another woman. And dozens back. She wasn't even surprised. What made her angry, apart from the betrayal, was how bloody stupid he was. The messages were pretty cringe-making and didn't leave much to the imagination. Here it was: the who, the what, and the where. She could imagine the how, but not the why. Never the why, because she'd always hoped. Now she'd simply run out of forgiveness and understanding, remembering all the nights she'd lain there next to him, wanting to be touched. To be held. To be loved in a simple way. But simple things were always the hardest.

 
Mary saw herself reflected in the window. A ghost super-imposed on the darkening town. She felt like a haunting, not a real person, but something made of ash. A residue. Afterlife rather than life itself. Then she remembered Mark asleep in the next room and felt the tug of love. Des would be missing him. He was probably still angry with her after what she'd done, though he'd never stayed angry for long.

‘Charm' was Charlotte Hamilton, an old school friend of Mary's. Someone Des only knew because of her. Because they'd been introduced at a party when they'd all had too much to drink.
Des, this is Charlotte. We were at school together
. And Charlotte giggling with her chalky teeth, making big eyes and pulling her top down over her breasts, pretending to be more drunk than she really was. Somehow they'd connected. And they'd carried on connecting. She'd called him
Taser
in the emails. Which must have been code for something. It wasn't hard to guess. Mary hadn't even been granted the minimum consideration of her husband making love to a stranger. All their friends were bound to know about it in the end. The women who waited for their children at the school gates at four o'clock each afternoon. The women who asked how she was and touched her arm. He hadn't even tried to deny it when she forwarded one of Charlotte's emails to him. But then, how could he?

Mary stood at the window, watching traffic negotiate the freezing snow. Watching the closure of the night. She'd grow old like this. Alone. Time had slipped away from her somehow. She was losing track of so many things. Except memory, which could still cut her with its cruelties. She thought about Des more and more, when that should have been less and less. He was the kind of man who went bald young and still looked good. A crooked grin and close-set ears. Slightly hooded eyes and heavy brows had made him seem thoughtful. He liked to play five-a-side football and have a pint with his mates afterwards. Which wasn't asking much, except that it rarely stopped there. He'd been a bit of a Jack-the-lad in his day. Women liked him for some reason. Why on earth that had attracted her she couldn't remember. Perhaps because he was so different from her father. They'd never got on, of course. He was dad's idea of a waster. Things had come too easy. Des had a Saab convertible when Mary met him, but that had to go after they got married and Mark was born. He'd never really settled down to a Vauxhall saloon and a semi-detached house on a new estate with a lawn to cut and a rockery and the Neighbourhood Watch twitching their curtains whenever they came or went. But then neither had she.