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‘Hello,’ she whispered, and then pulled me down and started hissing in my ear like a ferocious little boiler.
‘What?’ I said, trying to edge my head away from her and get the words into focus. ‘What?’
She was telling me that he could sleep in her bed and if he wanted he could have one of her teddies, not old brown teddy but one of the others, the one with the pink pyjamas. Pushover.
*
And that is how we all came to be sitting around the breakfast table reading anonymous letters.
Hakim denied all knowledge. I had no knowledge. But then that is how it’s meant to be with anonymous letters. I didn’t like it.
Then there were three calls where whoever it was said nothing at all, just left the line hanging open. The first time it was only a few minutes, the second about ten, and the third nearly quarter of an hour. I 1471ed them, but of course they’d been blocked. So I called BT to get them to do something about it. But it didn’t happen again. I tried to file it under irritating, but I couldn’t quite.
Then it was chased out of my mind by a call from Harry, saying could he come round. Harry worried me more than the letter. These uncommunicative communications were new, and external, unknown. Harry is deep in me.
Harry is a half-settled negotiation, a half-healed wound.
You need to know a bit more about Harry, other than that he was my darling, for years, years ago.
I had of course wondered how he came to be a policeman after so many years of being a bit wide and a bit flash, automotive man with his fully-powered V8 Pontiacs and his James Dean jeans. We’d been sitting on the deckchairs on the balcony outside the flat, a few days after Jim’s claim to Lily had crashed and burned. The fallout was fairly spectacular, what with Eddie Bates being arrested, Ben Cooper the Bent Copper getting his comeuppance, Harry turning out to be a policeman, and Jim turning out not to be Lily’s father after all.
*
I realise that I’m still not mentioning it. The offensive thing. The other things I found out. The bit I hate and have not … OK. These are the things:
a) My sister never told me she was a prostitute.
b) She made pornographic films using religious accoutrements, specifically clothing more usually worn by devout Muslim women for reasons of modesty, and used in these works of art bits of film of me dancing.
c) She pretended to be me in order to sell sex to men who had admired me in performance.
I don’t like to think about these things.
I recall sitting there with my feet up on the balcony wall, bandaged up from my dashing getaway after Eddie abducted me and … well, anyway there we were, in the evening sun, drinking beers from the bottle, admiring the sunset over the A40 and watching Lily and Brigid’s children careering about on their bicycles up and down the balcony, waiting for Mrs Krickic next door to come out and tell them to slow down a bit because they were disturbing her budgies. Harry and I circling each other in the fallout, coming round, making up, moving on … who knows.
‘So why did you become a policeman, Harry?’ I asked.
He looked very sheepish. Having been undercover, I suppose he wasn’t accustomed to talking about it. I suppose. I don’t know. What do undercover people do or feel? What do I know about undercover? But he’s not very accustomed to talking anyway. Joking, yes. Charming, yes, in his tall, laconic way. But not talking. I used to like it: I could read anything I wanted into his handsome silences, and did. But now I’m older and I’m not so insecure, and I like to know what’s going on.
‘Um,’ he said.
I waited encouragingly.
‘Well actually,’ he said, and looked a little puzzled, and then sort of took a breath, and almost laughed a little. He shot me a glance, sideways. This is what he has always done when preparing to confide. It pleased me that he still did it. Made me feel that I knew him. Made me feel secure, at one with the world. A bit.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Because of High Noon.’
I was silenced for a moment.
I began to hum, ‘Do not forsake me, oh my darling,’ without realising I was doing it.
‘Well, you asked,’ he said.
High Noon. Where Sheriff Gary Cooper had to deal with the bad guys even though he had a ticket out of town with the lovely Quaker girl who didn’t believe in violence, and none of the cowardly townsfolk would help him, so he did it alone.
‘High Noon,’ I mused.
‘I wanted to do the right thing,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
He seemed so uncomfortable admitting that he had some notion of morality, and that it had made him do something, that I didn’t push him. I think he was truly embarrassed. Identifying with Gary Cooper.
But certainly it changed my view of him. From black leather to white stetson, just like that. The bastard cross of Marlon Brando and Del Boy turns out to be Gary Cooper.
Of course all this coincided terribly conveniently with my own sweeping gavotte through life. Here was the peripatetic biking belly dancer grounded and mature with a bad leg and a baby; here was the bad man turned good and willing to consider that he might be said baby’s father. ‘I want to do the blood test,’ he’d said, on the evening of the day of comeuppance. And, ‘I want to see her. And you.’ And, ‘I want you to change the birth certificate. Even if it’s only to Father Unknown.’
But who knows what they want? And who knows whether it’ll make them happy? As I can’t remember which country singer (in a white hat) sang: ‘Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.’
All I wanted was peace and quiet. I wanted to sit on the bench in the playground with my boots in the dust and the fag ends and the dead plane leaves, and watch Lily climb ropes. I wanted to bathe her and tuck her in and read Thumbelina to her. I wanted to watch her eat, and to make myself a cheese sandwich in the evening knowing she was asleep in the next room, not scratching her eczema (I wanted her eczema gone). I wanted it to be how it was before Jim and Eddie Bates and Ben started to upturn our lives with their blackmail and lies and obsessions; how it was in the gilded imaginary quotidian past. I didn’t want to upturn it even further with the very serious, very real question of her dad. In other words, I wanted to bury my head in the sand. And I did.
But then, sitting on the balcony that night, talking about Gary Cooper, Harry said: ‘Part of it, you know, is …’
‘Is what?’ I said.
‘Lily,’ he said.
‘What about her?’
‘What I said that night.’ He didn’t have to say what night. We knew what night. The night that chaos dissolved.
‘Mm,’ I said.
‘The blood test,’ he reminded me, gently.
‘Mmm.’
I knew he was right, within his rights. I knew it was fair. I knew, rationally, that I didn’t have a leg to stand on. I knew that I probably couldn’t stop him doing it anyway. But my heart cried out against it. Cried and wept. Why? Fear, I suppose. Simple fear.
‘I can’t do it, Harry,’ I said, knowing as I said it what a daft and pathetic thing it was to say.
‘It’s not you that’d do it,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to do anything. I’d just get it done, and then I’d tell you, and we’d … we’d take it from there.’ We hadn’t a clue, then, either of us, of the practicalities. Let alone the repercussions. (Nice word, repercussion. Re-percussion. There’s a verb: percuss, to strike so as to shake. Well there you go.)
‘Shut up,’ I said.
He was looking at me, quite kindly, twiddling the empty beer bottle in his big skinny hands, leaning forward a little.
‘How long for?’ he asked.
‘How long what?’
‘How long shall I shut up for? I mean, I can see you probably need a bit of time, having just had Jim breathing down your neck being the bad father, and maybe a father is not what you want right now, but, well, the question’s been asked now, hasn’t it? So how long, do you think, before you’ll want to know? Because you’re going to want to.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘No, but you will.’
‘Don’t patronise me, Harry. I don’t want to know. It’s a positive act of not wanting. I actively want not to know. I desire ignorance.’
‘Why? Are you scared?’
‘No I’m fucking not. Don’t give me that crap.’
‘Why not? I’m scared. I’d think it was incredibly scary.’
‘I like things as they are. That’s all. Harry—’
‘What?’
‘Please can we leave it.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But for how long?’
‘Oh for God’s …’ Well. OK. Buy time. ‘Fifty years,’ I said, rather idiotically.
‘It might be worth pointing out, Angel, that you aren’t the only person involved in this,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry?’ I replied, cold suddenly, and deadly courteous.
‘Lily …’ he began, poor fool, but he did no more than begin before I bit him off: ‘Do you think that I’m not aware of that?’ I snapped. ‘Do you think that every single thing I do isn’t for her wellbeing? Do you imagine that I ever for one moment stop considering what’s best for her? Do you think I don’t know? My whole fucking life for nearly four years has been based on what she wants and what she needs and I do not need you muscling in and telling me that I need to take her into consideration. I do take her into consideration. I do every bloody thing that is ever done for that child including protecting her, when she needs it, from people she doesn’t know who think they have something to do with her. If I’d told her Jim was her father how do you think she would feel now? Now that he’s decided that oh no, he isn’t after all, silly me it’s just my wife fancied having a kid. Who her father is and what happens about that is an incredibly bloody serious issue and if I’m not up to thinking about it and controlling what happens about it then it is not to happen, that’s all. The damage it could do her is immeasurable. And it’s down to me. I decide when and how. And I say no. No.’
So I was ranting. Harry has never been impressed by my ranting.
‘It’s not just Lily,’ he said, calmly. If anything he was even more unflappable now. Unpercussable.
‘What?’
‘It’s not just Lily.’
‘Oh. So, what. It’s you. You need to know. You feel odd. You want to know.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
I looked him a look.
‘It’s not unreasonable,’ he said.
‘It’s not possible,’ I said, in only half-fake disbelief. The nerve of him.
‘Yes it is.’
‘No it’s not.’
‘You can’t say that.’
‘Just did,’ I retorted, maturely.
‘Angel,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to … but you can’t control it. It’s not just you. It’s the truth – you’ll have to face it. You can’t just boss it around.’
‘I can have a damn good try.’
‘Why do you have to be in charge of everything?’
‘Because I am. Aren’t I? Who else is?’
‘You could let someone help you.’
‘This is getting a little clichéd, Harry. I get plenty of help, thank you, so you needn’t bother offering. I really don’t think you’d be much use, frankly.’
‘Yes I would.’
‘You. Yeah. Very likely. Teach her to drive and check the gap on a sparkplug, babysit and embarrass my boyfriends when we get home. I don’t need it.’
‘You don’t know what a father might give …’
‘You don’t know whether you’re her father.’
‘I know. It doesn’t make it any easier. She’s asleep in there and … Let me find out. Let me try.’
‘No. Or – OK, yes. Try this. You’re her father, you want to give her what she needs. What she needs right now is a period of calm after a period of upset. She needs it as much as I do. She also needs me to have a period of calm after a period of upset. I’m not confusing our needs here, I’m recognising that they are the same. That’s what she wants, what she needs. You can give that to her. Will you?’
I couldn’t read his face at all. His expression was remote – his Mongolian face, I used to call it. Narrowed eyes and inscrutable and handsome.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘How long a period of calm?’
I could have kicked him. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Amazing!’ he murmured.
‘What?’
‘Something you don’t know!’
‘Don’t be like that.’
‘I’m not being like that,’ he said. ‘I have no intention of being like that. OK, tell me how long within three months, or I’ll enquire again. And if you need anything, ring me. I’m assuming,’ he said, ‘that you’re keeping me hanging on, not counting me out.’
My oh my, is he a different man in this white hat. What kind of a comment is that from an emotional illiterate?
I gave him a rather pathetic smile, and he left. Since then, we’d maintained a quiet and sparse rapprochement. During Eddie’s trial, which came up gratifyingly quickly, I didn’t see much of him. He wasn’t directly involved himself – undercover, see – but he kept me posted. If there is one thing I should be grateful to Harry for, it is that he managed to see Eddie put away without my having to give evidence, without my role in the drama coming out. Eddie was guilty of quite enough other things – mister-bigging it for gangs of drug dealers and smugglers and pornography and God knows what. Kidnapping little old me and attacking me was peanuts to his real career, and didn’t come up in court, which was just as well.
