Whatever You Love (20 page)

David looks briefly horrified, then starts to back-pedal. ‘No, no, she’s been much better since, since we lost Betty, I mean she’s really trying hard. I know it sounds dreadful the way I’ve put it but somehow, well it seems to have made her snap out of it a bit. She’s done her best to be supportive, she’s not an idiot. It’s the long term I’m worried about though. I just feel it’s all waiting in the wings. How long can she keep it up?’

But I know she is not okay. I know because I’ve had four anonymous letters since we lost Betty. Chloe feels threatened. ‘I want Rees back.’

‘You can, of course you can. Any time. I just wanted to give you some time.’ He sits back but keeps his voice low. ‘Anyway, I just needed to tell you. It’s not as simple as me being comforted by my new partner and baby, that’s all. She seems to have pulled herself together a bit but I know it’s not going to last. I have to watch what I say. Can you imagine that? At a time like this, I have to be careful. God knows how I’ll explain tonight. And it’s sick that at a time like this I’ll even have to do any explaining. You’d think she’d have some sense of bloody perspective.’ I note the bitterness in his voice.

I am calculating fast. I don’t know what to do. I want to tell David about the letters because I think that now, for the first time, he might believe me. But what if he challenges Chloe about them? My son is living in her house. I want to go there now and snatch Rees back. But if he stays with them for a little longer, even just a few more days, I can do what I have set out to do.

David must be able to read the worry on my face even though he doesn’t understand the extent of it. ‘Look, please don’t worry about Rees, honestly, you don’t think I would leave her with him for a second if I thought she wasn’t up to it? She’s much better with Rees than she is with Harry, that’s how weird it is. She’s always loved Rees, right from the start. They get on like a house on fire. That’s why it’s been so hard for me to understand why she hasn’t bonded at all with Harry. I thought her own baby would, well, you know. Honestly, please, I really shouldn’t have said anything. I’ve probably made it sound much worse than she is. She really has been a lot better, lately.’ He is clearly sincere when he says this and I struggle to believe there is accuracy behind the sincerity. ‘I would never have gone back to work for a minute if I thought she wasn’t okay; I’ve got Harry to think of too, remember. And her mum is around a lot to help, although to be honest that’s a mixed blessing.’

‘Will you tell her you saw me tonight?’

He looks at the table. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’

‘It’s okay,’ I say, ‘don’t tell her.’

He stays looking at the table for a long while and I know that his thoughts have moved away, far away, from Chloe and the state of his relationship with her, or me, or even the well-being of his two small sons. I stare at him and I know where he is. I am there too. He gives a deep sigh, then lifts his gaze to meet mine, and we stare at each other, just as we used to all those years ago when we first met but with so much else swimming in our gazes, sad, wide acres of it. Eventually, it is him who breaks the spell by looking down.

‘Is it ever okay, for you?’ I ask gently.

He looks at me and sees it is not a trick question, that I really want to know. He looks at the table, the spread of food. Am I imagining it or has the waiter brought more while we have been absorbed in our conversation? We can’t have ordered all of this; it seems ludicrous.
Look, here is normal life, spread
before you. You would have smiled at this, before. You would have
wanted it. Look at how the rest of your lives are going to be, brimming
with things you no longer desire
.

‘For a few minutes, sometimes,’ he says plainly. ‘When I go in to pick up Harry in the morning, remember that bit, when you’re half asleep? Sometimes I get all the way to the kitchen with him on my shoulder, and I put the bottle in the microwave. Sometimes I get that far before I remember, because I’m only half awake and thinking about what he needs. I never get as far as the actual feed, though. I remember before then. I think about it as I look at him, while I’m giving him the bottle. I just think about Betty while I’m looking at him. He looks like Betty, you know, really like her. I don’t think I’m imagining it, I thought it before.’

I know the second I am awake. As soon as I register consciousness, the knowledge comes upon me, like a huge dark wave, so huge and dark it pins me to the bed. Even if Rees is calling me from the door of my room, sometimes, I cannot lift my head.

‘Television,’ I say. ‘Now you have Rees, I’ve been watching television a bit, in the afternoons. I saw something the other day, one of those black and white things set in an office in New York. The Empire State Building. Women in hats, lots of wisecracking. I went a whole hour.’

‘Have you tried reading?’

‘Can’t do books, too serious. Magazines sometimes, something really shallow, the more shallow the better.’

‘Good,’ he says, and manages a half-smile. ‘We need that, good.’

We both have one hand lying on the tablecloth. At the same time, we withdraw them. He looks down at the food, then back up at me and we stare at each other. The first meal we ever had together was a curry. Halfway through it, while we were talking, he tore off a small piece from the naan bread on his plate, dipped it in the dhal and then held it out to my lips. I paused mid-sentence and opened my mouth to him, quite naturally, without comment. Later in the meal, he found a particularly good piece of meat from the lamb bhuna we were sharing, stabbed it with his fork and held it up to me, again without comment. This time, we were more leisurely, more self-conscious about the gesture. I leant forward slightly, looking into his eyes. He placed the meat gently in my mouth, then withdrew the fork slowly as my lips closed upon it. As a seduction technique, it was highly effective – inside, down there, I was awash – but he did it later in our relationship too, long after he needed to seduce me. It wasn’t all the time, just once in a while: a bite of bagel, an apple chunk, a crumbly piece of coffee and walnut cake on a plastic fork… If this tapas restaurant scene had been a meal from our old days, he would have lifted one of those green beans, dripping in oil, and offered it to me, and my mouth would have opened as easily as that of a bird.

We stare at each other. In a moment, the waiter will reappear. When he does, we will ask for the bill. When we have paid, we will leave the restaurant in silence, our dinner uneaten, our heads full of thoughts we have not uttered. Our hands will not have touched. He will not have fed me anything. Our daughter will walk between us as we leave, not with us, not here.

Mr A is fifty-four years old. He lives in the caravan development up on the cliff – the one there has been all the local controversy about. I know this because of my dealings with the Upton Centre. The Upton Centre is on the other side of Eastley, not far from the industrial estate. It was a Youth Centre when I was growing up, the sort of place that believed a pingpong tournament every Thursday night would prevent the local teenagers from sniffing rags soaked in the petrol they had stolen from the nearby tyre factory. The industrial estate was a couple of miles inland – were it not for the armies of shrieking gulls that wheel in the harsh sky you could be in the flatlands of the Midlands. Burnt rubber, that area smelt of, I remember, a smell that hung in the air like a solid object and gave the whole district a post-disaster feel, as if it was some sort of radioactive zone that should be patrolled by men in white suits with breathing apparatus – an atmosphere of blank dereliction that was perfect for disaffected youth.

I went to the Youth Centre once for a disco, with Jenny Ozu. We wore huge scarves and drainpipe jeans and hairslides. When we got there, we spent the evening clinging to the wall and drinking flat Coke out of paper cups while gangs of boys jumped arrhythmically on the dance floor, arms flailing. Every now and then, one of the boys would wheel up to us and flash a flat half-bottle of vodka he had pulled from the pocket of his baggy trousers – not so much offering us some as threatening us with it, threatening us with the nameless consequences of the fact that he was drinking it. Eventually, inevitably, a fight broke out, and Jenny and I went back outside to where her mother was waiting for us in her car with the radio on and a pencil in her mouth as she worked her way through a puzzle book.

Places like the Upton Centre move with the times. Now it is an advice centre for local refugees and economic migrants. A one-stop shop, it calls itself. Most of the staff there have a week’s training in refugee issues but think nothing of ringing us to demand a better service for their ‘clients’ when we have been treating them for years – in our office, we regarded referrals from the Upton Centre with suspicion. I once had one where the advice worker had sent over a report stating that ‘her client’ suffered from chronic back pain due to the ‘psychological consequences of displacement’. When I questioned and examined her client, a shy Kosovan woman in her fifties called Marina, I thought she had a possible prolapsed disc and put her on Co-dydramol until I could sort out her referrals. Marina did suffer from the psychological consequences of displacement. She was also an insomniac desperately worried about the teenage children she had left behind in Priština, but she had a slipped disc.

Mr A comes from the same group, mostly ethnic Albanians from Kosovo but also some Bosnians I think. It is a group that has had a lot of dealings with the Upton Centre but mostly on the legal rather than the medical side, due to the fact that although some of their extended family unit are legal migrants, some are not. There have been health problems too, as there always are in socially deprived groups. One of the other women has been visiting our unit regularly, and this is how Mr A’s name has come to be on our records. The referral, for chronic back pain, again, came through the GP. Mr A was named as next of kin, although it isn’t clear what relationship, if any, he is to the woman. He is the leader of the group, it seems, so it may be no more than that.

The industrial estate at Eastley is my first port of call. I have to be careful because it isn’t far from Hennett’s, where David and Chloe work, although he isn’t there much at the moment and Chloe is still officially on maternity leave. I drive past the Upton Centre, set back from the main road, then Hennett’s, then reach the industrial estate, the working population of which is almost entirely migrants. The grey metal gates are standing open and there is no security or reception hut. I drive through, straight to the far end, passing the vast dark warehouses with their huge doors like open mouths and the squat brick buildings with flat roofs and no windows. Here is the underbelly of all our lives, the places where things are stored and shipped and put together. There are no shop names or hoardings here; no coloured signs, no invitations of any sort. There are no passers-by to entice in. You would only come here for a reason.

I park my car in the deserted overflow car park and as I climb out of it, the first thing I notice is the stink of fish waste from the cat food processing plant next to the car park, then as I walk past it, upwind, that strange burnt-tyre smell from my youth, the hot thick scent of things unwanted. There is a small roundabout in the middle of the industrial estate, planted with sagging tulips. There are even two benches, placed with their backs to each other, in the middle of the roundabout. I wonder if workers come out to sit there in the summer, with their backs to each other, staring at the warehouses. There is nowhere else to eat your sandwiches, that much is certain. I pull my coat around myself and tighten the belt as I walk. This was the sort of place where both my parents worked before they had me – my father’s old factory was on a similar estate on the edge of our town, my mother was a secretary there, that’s how they met. They were already both in their thirties by then and both of them still living with elderly parents. I can’t imagine their courtship, having always suspected them of being the sort of people who never expected anyone, let alone each other. What little I have guessed at of their early lives made me fear the same fate, in the hard, determined way we always fear what we are destined for. It was my father’s early death and mother’s illness that licensed me to defy that fate, a thought that made me grateful and guilty and lonely. There is camaraderie in doing what you were meant for, after all, even if you hate the thing itself. I found myself in the pub with Maurice at the end of an evening, once, on a night when he became uncharacteristically morose. ‘I don’t know why it’s always me that suggests coming the pub,’ he said, sneerily, having had one pint of dry cider too many. ‘It’s not as if I’ve really got anything in common with you lot, you dedicated types. I never wanted to work for the NHS…’ He took a long gulp from his pint, then added, ‘I wanted to have my own hotdog van, that’s what I wanted.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ I asked.

‘It wouldn’t have suited me,’ he replied.

Not far past the roundabout with its drooping, bleached tulips and empty benches, I find what I am looking for. I cannot stop and stare at it – I have to keep walking, albeit slowly, as if I am on my way somewhere else. The roll-down door is open and the workers inside are clearly visible. They are all wearing coats and hats or headscarves – they are unprotected from the wind. In the middle of the warehouse are rows of trestle tables piled with open cardboard boxes. Nearest to the door, I can see a table covered in a heap of zips. There is a young woman sorting the zips according to size and colour – a pile of short green ones, a pile of long black ones, some brown ones of varying lengths. There is a large bin beneath the table and as I pass, the young woman is fiddling with a zip that is broken. After three attempts to shift it up and down, she bends slightly and tosses it into the bin. While she does this, she is smiling and chatting to the young woman next to her who has a table piled with squares of brown leather. A voice calls out and an older woman approaches the young woman with the zips and begins to remonstrate with her. The young woman stares back sulkily as the older one retrieves the broken zip and holds it up.

I keep walking but I am making a stupid mistake: I am staring. They are alerted to my presence in the way that people often are when you stare at them, even though they are looking away. They both turn towards me and in the same instant, the older woman and I recognise each other. I look away immediately and quicken my pace but feel her gaze on my back as I stride towards the main gates of the industrial estate. I only saw her for a moment, but I am sure she was one of the women who came to the crematorium on the day of Betty’s funeral, and I am quite sure she knows who I am too.

When I reach the main gate, I have a problem. The road leads straight out on to the deserted highway which, after passing Hennett’s and the Upton Centre and two other factories, heads back into Eastley. The industrial estate is fenced and there is no other route back to my car apart from the one that passes the warehouse and the roundabout. In the end, I walk aimlessly up the grass verge next to the road, for fifteen minutes or so, with lorries whooshing heavily past in a rush of exhaust fumes, making me sway in the downdraft. I reach a small lay-by where there is a seat made of concrete full of pebbles and sit down on it for a few minutes. It is freezing cold and my nose is running and I don’t have a tissue. I squeeze my nose with my fingers. To my left, there is a thicket of brambly thorn bushes with shreds of tissue stuck to the lower branches. If I was truly desperate, I could extract a big enough shred to wipe my nose but I don’t like to think what else those tissues have wiped. When I feel enough time has passed, I rise and walk slowly back to the main gates of the industrial estate. I make sure I am walking on the other side of the road as I approach the roundabout but my caution turns out to be unnecessary. The roll-down door has been lowered and padlocked. There is no one in sight. Nonetheless, I feel sure of one thing: this is where the women work but not the men. I won’t find him here.

Driving back along the dual carriageway, I slow the car as I pass Hennett’s. I wonder if David is there today, or whether he is at home with Chloe and the boys. ‘The boys’… it has a cosy, easy feel: two boys. Hennett’s has a neat pebble driveway and an open area with a smiling receptionist. Whichever receptionist was on duty whenever I visited David’s office, they always seemed to be wearing an engagement ring, as if they all put the same one on as they sat down in the chair behind the desk, instead of a uniform. As I drive past, I imagine Chloe pulling into the neat pebble driveway on her first day at work there – she would have had a small hatchback, I guessed, immaculately clean, purple perhaps. I imagine her parking behind the building and then walking around to Reception in neat, swift movements, legs scissoring. I imagine her smiling brightly at the receptionist and saying, ‘Hi, I’m Chloe. I’m starting work today. I’m here for David Needham.’ Perhaps she would have extended her hand. Perhaps she exclaimed in admiration at the receptionist’s engagement ring.

*

As I drive back through town, I hear my mobile phone ringing, in my handbag, which is on the passenger seat beside me. It rings twice, then stops. Then it starts again a second and then a third time, the same each time, two rings then nothing. On the fourth try it rings six times before going to voicemail and, a few moments later, there is the penetrating beep that tells me someone has left a message. I pull in and mount the grass verge just before the one-way system and, flicking on my hazard lights, pull my phone out of my bag. The call log tells me I have four missed calls from a withheld number. I wonder if it could be Toni – her cop phone always registers as withheld – but when I listen to the message on my voicemail, nobody speaks. It is a long stretch of nobody speaking that goes on for longer than I listen to it, which is several minutes. After a while, I end the call to voicemail and toss the phone on top of my bag, then pick it up and listen again, my hand over my other ear to impede the drone of passing traffic. It sounds as though somebody has accidentally called my number as they are walking along the street, the phone in their pocket. I can hear muffled footsteps and background noises, cars and conversations passing, an indistinct acoustic of public space. Then, just at the point where I am convinced that somebody has called me four times accidentally, I hear something I didn’t hear the first time – a long sigh, a sigh that makes me feel cold. It is not a sad sigh but a malevolent one, a sigh of satisfaction. It is so close to the phone’s microphone that I feel a sudden shock, as if someone has just tapped me on the shoulder in my own car. The phone is not in someone’s pocket or handbag; it is in her, or his, hand, close to their mouth – the intimacy of it – a mouth near my face.

After the sigh, there comes more background noise, but I don’t listen. I press the ‘end call’ button with a fierce jab of my thumb, then delete the message, then go to my call log and delete all the registers. I throw the phone back into my handbag and restart the car’s engine. As I pull out into the road, a car comes round the corner behind me, too fast, and blares its horn in fury as it swings by, the arc of sound making a dying howl.

*

My free local paper, the weekly, is waiting for me on the mat when I get home. When there were other people in my house, immediately after the event, this paper always disappeared as soon as it was delivered – I realise now that people were protecting me from reports about Betty and Willow. There was a council meeting about parking regulations; Witchard’s Factory Wardrobes was having a sale; secondary schools’ admissions policy was under review. It is surprising what can seem insulting, just how much can be taken personally.

I unfold it and turn the pages rapidly, as I sink down at the kitchen table. The tensions in the town have not abated, it would seem. Last Wednesday, a young woman was followed out of the Chinese takeaway on Clifton Rise by three or four youths who began taunting her about her accent. When she told them to go away, one of the youths took her takeaway from her hand, removed the lid and pushed the hot food in her face and hair. A local councillor is quoted as saying that newcomers to the town must understand the strength of local feeling about unemployment. I wonder if the young woman was one of the young women I saw earlier that day in the warehouse, smilingly sorting through the zips or patches of leather, feeling safe amongst her friends and colleagues, until a strange woman passed by staring at her and reminded her there are always a thousand reasons to feel uncomfortable, to know you are not safe. I shake my head. I must not start to think all things are linked. I will go mad.