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At exactly six I go in. At first I can’t see him. I try to remember his face, but it eludes me, though I saw it so precisely in my dream. I worry, like a girl on a first date, that he’s here and I haven’t recognised him.
He’s in the corner, by the fruit machine. I see him before he sees me. In that brief moment before he knows I’m there, he seems quite different from when we met before, his shoulders bowed, head lowered—as though something weighs on him and presses him down. As though there’s a shadow on him. This surprises me.
He looks up.
‘Ginnie.’
He’s vivid, eager, again. I forget the shadow.
He stands and kisses me lightly, his mouth just brushing my skin. I breathe in his smell of smoke and cinnamon.
‘I’ll get you a drink,’ he says.
‘I’d love a whisky.’ I wish that my voice didn’t sound so girlish and high.
The pub looks as though it hasn’t been decorated for years. The chairs have grubby corduroy seats, and there are curtains with heavy swags, and eighties ragrolled walls. You can smell hot chip oil. The place is filling up with workers from local offices, relaxing before their journey home—raucous men with florid ties, and women in crisp trouser suits and wearing lots of lip gloss. A teenage boy with an undernourished look and blue shadows round his mouth and eyes comes up to the fruit machine and starts to play.
I take off my coat, rather carefully: my body feels clumsy and ungainly. I watch all the glittering colours that chase across the fruit machine. I have a strong sense that I’m forgetting something important. Pictures of home move through my mind, a catalogue of possible disasters: Amber losing her keys and waiting on the doorstep in the cold, or starting a fire because she heats up the casserole after all and then gets sidetracked by an urgent text message. I take out my phone, I’m about to ring her again. But Will is coming back with my drink. I watch his easy grace as he weaves through the crowd towards me. Instead of ringing Amber, I turn off my phone.
He sits.
‘So you’re OK?’ he asks. Just to fill in the silence. His eyes linger on my face for a moment, then flick away. I realise he too is nervous.
‘I’m fine.’
He smiles at me rather earnestly, as though this is encouraging information.
‘I hope this pub’s all right,’ he says. ‘I thought it would be easier to talk here.’
‘Of course, it’s great,’ I tell him.
I think of the dream I had about him, his warm slide into me, the shocking openness of it. Now, sitting here in this banal place with this man who’s still a stranger, I’m embarrassed by the memory of my dream.
He sips his beer.
‘Let me tell you,’ he says. ‘About young Kyle.’
‘Yes. Please.’
‘You were absolutely right,’ he says. ‘In what you suspected. The father’s very violent.’
I nod.
‘The mother called us a few times. I had a word with Naomi Yates, who’s her liaison officer. Nasty stuff: he used to choke her, she said. It started when she was pregnant. As so often.’ A kind of weariness seeps into his voice.
‘Did he ever hurt Kyle directly? ‘
‘Not so far as we know. That happens, doesn’t it?There are men who’ll beat up their wives and not lay a hand on the kids.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
He takes a sip of his beer. I watch his hands, his long pale fingers curving round the glass.
‘She’d leave and then go back to him. You know the story—these women who keep on leaving and then can’t stay away. All it takes is some tears and a bunch of cut-price roses. It’s one of the great mysteries, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘Why women don’t just give up on these psycho husbands.’ When he frowns, there are hard lines etched in his face. ‘There’s fear, of course, but it isn’t always fear. I don’t want to buy into that whole hooked-on-violence thing, but you’ve got to wonder.’
‘Perhaps it’s remorse they get hooked on,’ I say.
This interests him. Lights from the fruit machine with all their kaleidoscopic colours glitter in his eyes.
‘You could be onto something,’ he says. ‘I imagine it’s very seductive. He sobs and says he’s sorry and it’ll never happen again… We believe what we want to believe, I guess. About the people we love.’ His gaze is on me, that intent look. ‘I mean, we all do that, don’t we?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
This hint of intimacy stirs something in me, a little shimmer of sex.
‘You know about this stuff, then, Ginnie,’ he says,after a moment. ‘Well, of course you would. You work with the kids who get caught up in it all.’
I have a sudden sharp impulse to uncover myself, to reveal something.
‘It’s not just that,’ I tell him. ‘It’s in the family.’
His eyes widen. He’s very still suddenly.
‘Now, you mean?’ He leans towards me, his voice is careful, slow. ‘Or are we talking about the past here?’
‘Not now. Now is OK. In the past. My childhood.’
‘Your childhood,’ he says gently.
He makes a little gesture, reaching his hand towards me as though to touch me. His hand just over mine. My breathing quickens—I don’t know if he hears this.
There’s a resonant clatter of coins from the fruit machine beside us. The noise intrudes and pushes us apart. Will leans back in his chair again. The teenage boy scoops up his winnings and stuffs his pockets with coins.
Will looks at me uncertainly, but the mood has changed, we can’t get back there.
‘Tell me more about Kyle,’ I say.
‘The last time was the worst,’ says Will. ‘Naomi reckons this is what triggered the mother’s breakdown. She said she was going to leave, that this time she really meant it, and he threatened her with a pickaxe. Actually, threatened doesn’t quite capture it. I think this could be the thing you need to know.’
‘Kyle built a room with Lego,’ I say, ‘but he wouldn’t open the door.’
Will nods.
‘How Naomi told it—Kyle and his mother were in the bedroom, and she pushed the wardrobe over and barricaded them in. She’d got her phone, thank God, she managed to call us. We got there just as the father was breaking down the door. Afterwards he said he wanted to make her love him. Weird kind of loving.’ He twists his mouth, as though he has a bitter taste.
I shake my head.
‘I got it totally wrong,’ I tell him.
‘I’m sure you didn’t,’ he says.
‘No, really. He’s so terrified. And I thought the thing he was so scared of—I thought it was there in the room with him. That he’d been abused or something. He’s always so afraid.’
‘It’s a pebble chucked in a pond,’ he says. ‘That kind of violence. It reaches out, it hurts a lot of people.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
A little silence falls.
He leans towards me again. His hands are close to mine on the table.
‘Tell me about yourself, Ginnie,’ he says lightly. ‘You have a family of your own? ‘
I tell him about taking Molly to university. I feel uncertain though: it makes you seem so old, to have a child at college. I wonder if he’s working out my age.
‘It made me think how when I was just eighteen, I was so sure that one day I’d have everything sorted,’ I tell him. ‘That I’d know where I was going.’
‘I know just what you mean,’ he says. ‘And then you wake up and you find you’re forty and all that’s happened is that life just got more complicated…’
Forty, I think. Shit. Forty.
‘My other one—Amber,’ I tell him. ‘She’s sixteen. I worry about her. She drinks a lot and stays out late—I mean, she’s quite pretty.’
‘Well, she would be,’ he says.
His eyes are on me. I realise I am flirting, running my hand through my hair, pushing it back from my forehead, as though it were the sleek glossy hair you can do that with. For a moment I feel I have that kind of hair.
‘And you? ’ I ask.
‘We’ve got a son. He’s eight.’
He doesn’t tell me his son’s name, or anything else about him. I’m suddenly uneasy, as though everything is fragile. I don’t know where this feeling comes from.
‘So you’ve still got all that teenage stuff to look forward to,’ I say lightly.
He nods. There’s still a wariness about him.
‘And your wife?’ I ask tentatively, thinking of the photograph in his office, the woman with the long dark fall of hair. ‘What does she do?’
‘Megan’s a photographer,’ he says.
‘That sounds so glamorous,’ I say.
‘She’s good,’ he says, with a thread of pride in his voice. ‘She doesn’t work much now though. She’s not happy with that really. But I guess we all compromise.’
I would like to hear more: I have a feverish, disproportionate curiosity about her. But Will is distracted, staring over my shoulder across the room.
‘Great,’ he says, very quietly, meaning the opposite.
I turn and follow his gaze. The man who walks towards us is shorter than Will, but authoritative, in a sharply cut linen jacket the colour of wheat. They greet each other with that slightly forced bonhomie men will sometimes use, when they know each other well but aren’t at ease together. Will introduces us: the man’s name is Roger Prior and he works in the murder squad.
‘I’m helping Ginnie with a case,’ Will tells him.
‘Great to meet you, Ginnie,’ says Roger. I’d guess he comes from a different background from Will, probably rather affluent, his voice deliberately roughened to fit in.
He leans in towards me: I can smell his aftershave, a bland, rather sweet smell, with vanilla in it. His skin against mine is cool, like some smooth fabric: his handshake seems to last a little too long. I see myself through his eyes, sitting here drinking whisky when I should be home with my family, too old to be holding a stranger’s gaze and running my hand through my hair, my voice too eager, my shoes too bright and high.
‘Will’s helping out, then?’ says Roger. ‘Will’s always pleased to help.’
‘Ginnie’s a psychologist at the Westcotes Clinic,’ says Will.
‘A psychologist?’ says Roger, his cool grey gaze on me. ‘So you can see straight into me, Ginnie?’
My laugh sounds forced and shrill. Roger has an affable look but his eyes are veiled.
‘Well, I mustn’t distract you both,’ he says. ‘I mean, from your case discussion. Good to meet you, Ginnie. Don’t let Will take advantage.’
He goes to join someone the other side of the bar: but it’s as if he’s still with us—his scepticism and cool amusement and his vanilla smell. It’s hard to talk, to recover the ease we had, as though Roger’s pragmatism has undone something. I realise I had impossible hopes of this encounter—deluded, impossible fantasies. I know it’s time to leave.
I pick up my bag.
‘Well, thanks for the drink and the info. I guess I have to go.’
I’d like him to grasp my wrist and say, Don’t go yet, Ginnie.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We both should.’
As we get up the noise in the place breaks over me, all the talk and music and laughter. I can’t believe how unaware of it I’ve been. Roger is at the bar, chatting to a very toned blonde woman, who smiles and nods subserviently at everything he says.
I follow Will to the door. I think how I’ll never see him again, and a sense of loss tugs at me.
Outside it’s getting dark and the street lamps are lit, casting pools of tawny light. There are smells of petrol and rotting fruit, and a dangerous, sulphurous smell where kids have been letting off fireworks. A chill wind stirs the litter on the pavements.
‘God, what a dreary night,’ he says. ‘You’re the only bright thing in the street.’
This charms me.
I point out where I’ve parked my car, thinking we’ll say goodbye now and he’ll leave me. But he walks beside me.
I stop by the car.
‘That was a real help,’ I tell him. I’m very polite and reserved. ‘Thanks for taking the trouble.’
I’m fumbling in my bag for my keys, keeping my head down. I’m embarrassed at what he might read in my face, something too open and hungry.
‘A pleasure,’ he says.
I expect him to say goodbye but he just stands there. It’s quiet on the pavement, just for the moment no traffic, no one passing. I feel the quiet in me everywhere. I am stilled, waiting.
