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They both turn to face the car park where a few boys cycle about in circles, shouting at each other. Tristan hadn’t even noticed them coming round. Behind them, on the wall, sit three older boys: Ben Munday, who has been able to grow a full beard since he was thirteen, and two others, who wear red bandanas around their heads like rap superstars. Tristan still owes Ben Munday twenty quid. Shit.
‘You know them ragamuffins?’ Mary asks.
He shrugs. ‘Nope. Not really.’
‘But they’re looking at you.’ She scratches at her left elbow and inspects it, as if she has been bitten by something.
Tristan really doesn’t have twenty quid right now, his own cash depleted weeks ago, and Malachi is being tighter than usual with the student grants and carer benefits that keep them both ticking over. He considers asking Mary but something about the way she frowns and fidgets tells him she’s not in the most giving of moods.
‘Tristan Roberts,’ Ben Munday calls.
Mary widens her eyes. ‘You don’t know them? Liar. They look like crack dealers, like Bloods and Crisps.’
He laughs so hard he needs to use her little shoulder to support himself, ‘It’s Bloods and Crips. Where you getting this stuff from?’
‘Don’t make fun of me.’ She shakes him off. ‘I see it on Oprah. I know all about gangbanging.’
‘Please, never say gangbanging again. And stop being so judgey. They’re kids from my school.’ Though they both know the wall boys are long past school age.
‘Eh, Tristan?’ Ben Munday calls again.
This time Tristan knows there’s no escape. ‘I better go check them out, all right?’ He nods at her as he walks off slowly, already thinking of how to downplay knowing a ‘gang’ when his nan next asks him about it. ‘And Mary, get rid of that nasty old watch.’
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_58664019-fc5b-5f8b-8890-12d7140e8640)
Chapter Five ,Mary (#ulink_58664019-fc5b-5f8b-8890-12d7140e8640)
She watches Tristan walk over to the ragamuffins that line the wall. He touches fists with each of them, and Mary catches a glimpse of the big Cheshire cat smile that makes him so endearing. She doesn’t want to think anything bad of Tristan, who deserves a million chances to get it right, but he’s smoking too much marijuana and surrounding himself with too many bad influences.
When Mary promised the boys’ nan she would keep a close eye on them, she thought it would be an easy job. She had known them since they were babies and, despite their chaotic upbringing, they were mostly good boys. But Tristan worries her at the moment. It’s no longer as easy as telling him to stay off the streets and he stays off the streets. She can’t fool herself: she has no real control over him. It’s like what you see on Oprah. Boy listens to rap music telling him to go shoot a policeman. Next day boy goes and shoots a policeman. She worries about him. All the time she worries about him.
Again it comes: twitch, twitch, twitch. She pushes her short blunt nails into her bony elbow in an effort to stop the tic.
Right now, there is a worry bigger and more urgent than Tristan. Mary’s husband, David, will descend on her any day and she is sure her guilt will shine through like a firefly in a jar. She will slip up somehow, maybe smell differently or perhaps refer to something only a woman in love would know. He will watch her and he will realise: his wife is an adulteress. When he came last, just over a year ago, she had started seeing Harris Jones outside of their nurse and patient relationship. Nothing more than long walks around the Jewish graveyard behind his house. A place safe from the prying eyes of others, somewhere they could be together to look at the bluebells and put the world to rights. An innocent friendship. But now, now things were so different.
‘Hot enough for you?’ the big ginger man who lives in her block asks as he stands outside the phone box, his glasses sitting lopsided across his babyish face. He is new to the area, one of those care-in-the-community patients. He runs his hands down the front of his T-shirt; it has a print of a young Elvis Presley on it, all hair and curled lip. When Mary first met David he was working as an Elvis impersonator at The Manila Peninsula Hotel. Mary hates Elvis. She smiles politely at the man as she spots the number 53 pulling into the bus stop.
She flashes her bus pass and rubs her arms discreetly against her polyester white uniform. The door closes behind her and traps in the heat and smells of the passengers. Mary thinks of how she is breaking the vows she took all those years ago in the local church with the baskets of sun-bleached plastic flowers and the priest with the lisp. She falls into that awkward middle seat at the back of the bus and feels the woman to her right tighten her grip on a battered library book so their arms don’t touch. Mary can just about make out the title: Broken Homes Make Broken Children. An omen? It’s like the world is conspiring to tell her something about her own wrongness, her dishonesty. But broken children? Her twins were hardly children anymore, thirty-five this year, and with careers and families of their own. Mary can’t imagine John’s or Julia’s life being affected by her having an affair or finally divorcing David. Divorce. As the word enters her mind the scratch becomes a searing itch and she tries to distract herself. She pulls a tissue from her bag and dabs her clammy face; the sun catches her wedding ring and it glints sadly, as if to mock her failure as a wife.
The bus picks up speed and a welcome breeze flows through the narrow windows. The woman with the cursed book gives Mary a sideways glance, their eyes meet and she adjusts herself to face out of the window. No one wants to deal with a crying nurse on public transport. As the bus nears Vanbrugh Close, Mary stands and presses the bell. She squeezes herself past the other sweaty passengers, towards the exit, ready to get off and face her second life. The doors hiss open and she steps into the full force of the sun. Immediately, her state of guilt gives way to something like joy, for although her affair is sordid and secret it is also satisfying, and her heart thumps with schoolgirl excitement at the prospect of seeing him again.
The walk towards the close of bungalows fills her with a feeling she remembers first having when she was nineteen and on the cusp of marrying David. A feeling she enjoys but knows she should not have in relation to a man other than her husband. Pop music plays from a stereo; a father and teenage daughter wash down a car together. They both glance up and smile at her. They look like a television advert: perfect and happy. On the other side of the road an elderly lady in a straw hat and pink gardening gloves picks at a blooming brood of hydrangeas. Vanbrugh Close is a world away from Nightingale Point and its smelly stairwell, blinking strip lights and cockroaches. And as Mary turns into the small neat drive of Harris’s home, she realises the life she has created with this man is a world away from herself, from the woman she has grown to be: the mother of two, grandmother of four, nurse of thirty-three years and wife to a fame-chasing husband.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_b61acfbb-7b41-5345-bac0-7f76f7e44af9)
Chapter Six ,Pamela (#ulink_b61acfbb-7b41-5345-bac0-7f76f7e44af9)
She lies on the sofa listening to the neighbours’ argument as it sinks through the wall. The mother–daughter screaming matches have become an almost weekly occurrence, both of them going back and forth at each other in their matching catty voices. Pamela closes her eyes and imagines what it would feel like to scream and shout at Dad the way the girl next door does with her mum. Pamela could never; she would be too scared to say all the things she really thinks about him. She jumps at the sound of a door slamming in the neighbours’ flat, the sound that usually signals the end of the row. And now there’s nothing to distract her. She stretches each leg out above her head. She misses running so much. How long will this go on for?
On the train back from Portishead Dad had told her not to expect to return to London and fall back into her normal routines, but she never expected this, for him to actually lock her in the flat, to put a complete ban on her going out. There was only ever a slim chance of him letting her take up running again, but it was him that pushed her to start swimming after her injury, so why rule that out as well? There’s no way he could have found out how little she actually swam.
‘I’ve circled the ladies-only sessions for you,’ he had said as he handed her the pool timetable. He even went out and bought her a costume.
She knew she wasn’t going to like swimming as soon as she got into the cold changing rooms. Most of the locks on the cubicles were broken and women of all shapes and sizes roamed about naked. Pamela looked the other way as old ladies stood with their swimming costumes half hanging down, applying deodorant and chatting to friends. There were used cotton buds left on the wooden slat bench, the floor dusty with talc. Quickly, she changed into the overly modest costume and made her way out to the pool, her eyes already stinging from the chlorine.
As she waded through the water her fingers caught long strands of black hair. She couldn’t get a rhythm going, the pool was too small and crowded, and she found herself gripping the scaly tiles at the far end, waiting for someone to complete a lap so she could have a turn. There was no freedom, no clearing of the mind and no possibility of losing herself in the monotony of the movement. It was the opposite of everything she loved about running.
She flipped her collar up while she stood under the awning outside, watching the bus home pull away. If she ran she could be home in fifteen minutes, but there was no rush to get back there, to sit in the dreary living room alone.
Two people came towards her with their hoods up. One went through the sliding doors but the other one stopped.
‘Hey.’ It was Malachi. He removed his hood and wiped the rain from his face.
‘Hi.’ She wanted to smile back but instead looked around cautiously in case Dad appeared from somewhere.
‘How’s your leg?’
‘Fine. Well, no, it’s sprained, so I’m giving it a bit of a break from running.’
The sliding doors kept opening and closing until Tristan stepped out from them. ‘Mal, we’re not allowed in.’
‘What?’
‘Oh, it’s a women-only swim session,’ Pamela said.
Tristan stood between the two of them. ‘What kind of sexist nonsense is that? I bet they don’t run men-only sessions, do they?’
Malachi rolled his eyes.
‘Let’s go gym instead?’ Tristan said.
‘I told you, you’re too young for it.’
‘Come on, swimming never gave anybody a six-pack. Ain’t that right, Blondie?’ He nudged her side.
‘Maybe you should take up running?’ she suggested, still looking at Malachi.
‘I’d like that.’ Malachi smiled and held her gaze.
Tristan laughed. ‘Yeah, running is a great choice of sport for a chronic asthmatic.’
‘Tristan, I’m going to meet you back home, all right?’
‘For real?’ Tristan looked at Pamela like he wanted to laugh. But of course, it didn’t make sense that someone like Malachi, who was tall and perfect, would want to spend time with a girl like Pamela, who was plain and invisible.
Malachi dug in a pocket and pulled out a crumpled fiver. ‘Here, go cinema or something. I’ll see you later.’
Tristan kissed his teeth as he took the note. ‘All right, see you back home. Laters, Blondie.’ He threw up his hood and sulked off into the rain.
They stood and faced the road, the rain coming down heavier now.
She wanted to wait for him to speak first, but couldn’t hold it in. ‘You know it’s too wet to run, right?’
He looked at her. He had amazing eyes. ‘I know. And you’ve been swimming already. You hungry?’
She shook her head. She didn’t have money to eat out anywhere.
‘What about a drink then? There’s a greasy spoon over there, it does good milkshakes. I’ll race you.’
It was awkward as they ran to the café together, as if they both knew straight away there was something more happening. The smell of burnt onions hit her as they stepped inside. They sat opposite each other in metal chairs and he picked up the laminated menu and held it closely to his face, studying it for way too long. Frowning, his forehead wrinkling, he looked so serious, so utterly different from every other boy she came across at school.
‘How old are you?’ She felt embarrassed straight after asking it.
‘Twenty-one.’ He put the menu down and folded his arms. ‘Twenty-one going on sixty.’
She smiled at him. ‘I know the feeling.’
He looked at her for a beat too long.
‘I’m almost seventeen. I’m the oldest in my year group at school,’ she said, trying to justify their age gap. ‘Seventeen in September. If I was born one day earlier I would already be in college.’ She paused. ‘You and Tristan don’t look very much alike.’
‘No. We’re not alike in lots of ways.’
‘Do you have the same dad?’ she asked.
‘What kind of question is that?’
The milkshakes came and she felt she had blown it, asked a stupid question and revealed herself to be a stupid schoolgirl after all.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be nosy.’
‘He’s my brother. That’s all there is to it.’
She nodded and mixed the milkshake with the end of the straw.
‘Tristan said he’s never seen you at school before.’
‘No one sees me at school. No one sees me anywhere.’
‘I see you.’ Malachi smiled.
As they came out of the café, back into the real world, Pamela felt cautious again. ‘Do you mind if we walk back separately?’ she asked.
‘But we’re going to the same place.’
‘You met my dad – he’s quite strict about who I hang out with. He doesn’t really let me see boys.’
The word ‘see’ almost implied that she thought they had started a relationship.
‘I understand.’
How could this work? Could she really see him again? She wanted to. But there were lots of things she wanted to do but wasn’t allowed.
‘I don’t really have time to, you know … do stuff outside of school and sport. My timetable is quite packed.’
He straightened up and rubbed his face.
School and sport, that’s all her life was. Surely she could take the risk of having something else going on?
‘My dad wants me to go swimming every Tuesday and Thursday between six and eight. But I hate swimming.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘That I’m free every Tuesday and Thursday between six and eight.’
He nodded. ‘Got it.’
They separated as they reached the field in front of the estate. He sat on a bench and she walked off, trying her best not to keep looking back at him. She pulled her hair in front of her face, smelling its mix of chlorine and fried food, and knew she would never set foot in the pool again.
Pamela paces the flat like the caged animal she is, stopping each time to look at the front door. She misses Malachi so much. She doesn’t want to chase him, but he needs to know the truth. That she didn’t want things to end the way they did and hopes they can work out a way to still be together. But first, there’s something else she needs to tell him.
What can she do? She doesn’t want to talk over the phone; he’s always awkward on the phone. Half the time his phone is cut off anyway. But what choice does she have?
She picks up the phone and dials.
Thank God, it rings.
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_6d27704b-ee1d-5ad9-aac6-c7020584b7a2)
Chapter Seven ,Malachi (#ulink_6d27704b-ee1d-5ad9-aac6-c7020584b7a2)
Malachi pulls his books back onto his lap and tries again. He’s behind on his reading and hasn’t even made a start on the essay. There’s no way they will let him have an extension on the deadline again. The tutor won’t understand that he’s behind because he has a broken heart. It’s pathetic.
His eyes hurt and so does his head. Maybe Tristan’s right about the eyesight thing. He can’t concentrate. He sifts through the morning’s post. Junk mail and another bill. Where does all the money go anyway? He’s only just managed to clear the rent arrears and get the phone put back on. The electric bill looks steeper than usual this time, probably because of Tristan’s habit of running the hoover every day and putting on a wash for one or two T-shirts. Their mum never taught them anything about keeping home. They were learning as they went; they didn’t have a choice.
Malachi allows his head to fall back onto the beaten sofa, the plush long gone from previous owners, and puts his hands over his face. There’s got to be an easier way to get by than this.
‘Get it together,’ he says to himself. He wonders if there’s anything he can do to get some cash in. Well, there are things: someone had talked about selling knock-off TVs, and he’d also heard rumblings about single men with British passports being paid for taking part in bogus marriages. But both these things seem to come with a lot of risk. And Malachi has a lot to lose if things go wrong.
There’s no other option; it’s time to call Nan. The last thing he wants to do is stress her, or make her feel like she’s made a bad decision leaving him in charge here, but what choice does he have? He needs to watch the money more closely this month. He wishes he never bought that pair of pink and lilac running shoes for Pamela – they were so expensive. But her old ones were almost worn through and she seemed serious about taking up running again once she recovered from her injury. He wonders if she’s allowed out to run in Portishead. She’s probably not allowed to do anything there. Anyway, after what happened between them Pamela probably threw the trainers off the roof. She must hate him after what he did, how he denied her. It hurts to imagine her feeling this way; it’s so far from how she was at the start, back when she was completely into him. He misses those early days with her, when her dad worked long hours and she had freedom. Back when being in this flat, in his bedroom, felt like they were a million miles off the estate and away from all their problems. They would lie in bed and allow themselves to believe it would all work out, that her dad would relax and let go of whatever his prejudice against Malachi was.
He wishes he could stop thinking about her, stop using his memories of them together as a place to escape to. But how can he? When everything here and now is so challenging, so dull and so lifeless without her? He wants her back, back here in the flat with him, talking to him and making him laugh. He can’t stop thinking about those wintery afternoons; he can’t stop imagining he is there again.
‘It’s so cold. What time does your heating come on?’ Pamela had asked as she came back into the bedroom.
‘It doesn’t.’ He didn’t want to weigh her down with money problems, to soil their time together by talking about a situation he felt was drowning him.
She jumped back in the bed next to him and shivered. ‘Your brother’s home. He didn’t seem too pleased to see me here. Asked if I had permission from my dad to have a sleepover.’
