Blind Needle (3 page)

‘I dare say. Why did you tell the policeman I was your brother?'

‘Well – it wasn't you they were looking for. Was it?'

‘How do you know? I didn't see anyone else hitching a lift.'

She shrugged and smiled. She smiled easily, without strain or effort. Probably because she had good teeth. ‘Oh, it was just a feeling I had.'

‘Just a feeling,' I said. ‘That's quick. You must have known me for all of ten minutes.'

‘You might say it's part of my job, instant character assessment. I'm a writer, a novelist. Though whether I'm any good at it remains to be seen.' She looked round towards the bar. ‘God, I could eat something, couldn't you? Do you think mine host is amenable?'

She called to the landlord and he told us to go through into the restaurant. His wife would cook us something – they did grills and trout and sirloin steak. He even sounded vaguely apologetic that we might have to wait: ‘We don't employ a chef off-season, it isn't worth it. And everything is properly cooked, none of that microwave rubbish.'

When it came the food was plain but cooked with care, and Diane Locke ordered a carafe of red wine to go with it. I went sparingly on that; I wasn't used to alcohol and was already feeling the effect of one pint of beer. I wondered about the radio and whether anything had been said on the news. Where was S – now? I was certain I'd given him the slip. Almost two full days and he hadn't caught up with me. Did he know I had come north? I didn't think so, yet why did it continue to nag at me that possibly he did?

To be polite I asked Diane Locke what kind of things she wrote. The only writer I'd ever known was somebody who was at school with me who became a journalist on the
Manchester Evening News
.

‘Two novels published and one in the pipeline. God, the first one was dreadful, I'm ashamed of it now, but I suppose we all have to start somewhere. It only sold twelve hundred copies, so that was a blessing,
I suppose.'

‘What was the title?'

‘Need you ask?
The Moon and Immortality
.' She winced. ‘I still wake up blushing in the middle of the night whenever I think about it.'

The outer door opened and closed, footsteps rang on the tiles: a man's tread and also mercifully a woman's sharp heels. I listened to their footsteps ringing out and then suddenly muffled by the thick carpet as they went through to the bar, and it was a strain not to turn my head, even though I knew he would be alone. I ate some fried potatoes. ‘What's the new one about?'

‘A married woman who has an affair with a married man, and when she finally makes up her mind to leave her husband she finds that the other man doesn't want her, and neither, it turns out, does her husband. Sort of eternal triangle without the triangle.'

‘Sounds pretty bleak,' I said.

‘It's bleak all right.' She picked up her glass and studied it. ‘I oughtn't to be drinking this if I'm going to drive.' She drank half of it.

‘How does it end?'

‘Dunno.' She dabbed her lips. ‘It isn't finished.'

‘Are you – married?' I asked, as if the two things were connected.

‘I was. Not now. I've been divorced three years. I have two children both away at school, which he pays for – Desmond, my ex-husband – I couldn't afford it.' She speared a piece of fish and looked at me over the red glow of the lamp. ‘They won't come in here.'

‘What – who won't?' I said.

‘The police.' She tilted her head a fraction. ‘When the door opened just now you froze.'

‘It isn't the police I'm bothered about.'

I could hear the landlord greeting his new customers, who by the sound of it were regulars. Very gradually I could feel the stiffness and tension draining out of my spine, as if I'd been injected with anaesthetic. My head was swimming a little. The night before I had slept four hours, five at the most, and those in uncomfortable circumstances. All at once I felt very sleepy, as if someone had thrown a warm fluffy blanket over my shoulders.

She leaned across the table and whispered melodramatically, ‘A woman, then – or her husband?'

When I didn't reply straight away she said, ‘Shut up, Diane, mind your own business. You're absolutely right, don't answer. I shouldn't have asked. Sorry.'

‘I owe you some sort of explanation,' I murmured.

‘You don't owe me anything. I'll forget about it if you will. Are you married, Peter? Or is that prying too?'

‘I have been married. I mean, I was married …' Then I thought: the truth can't hurt, and said, ‘My wife is dead.' It came out brutally, like an electric shock, and it did hurt. ‘She was killed in an accident. They called it misadventure. Quaint,' I said bitterly, ‘some of the phrases they use.'

We dropped the subject, or rather Diane Locke chose not to pursue it. Some other people came in. They all seemed to know one another, shared a private language. There was laughter and some unfunny ribald remarks. To them this was a normal, average evening, in familiar surroundings, spent in the company of friends. They had homes and families waiting for them; they had destinations.

To me this was a lonely pub in the middle of nowhere on a windy rainswept night, my destination somewhere out there in the wind and rain.

Diane Locke went to call the garage, came back and topped up the glasses and drank most of hers. ‘A mechanic's been to look at it but there's nothing he can do. They'll tow it in in the morning. Something about a bearing.'

‘What about it?'

‘It's kaput. Have to send off to Walsall or Tokyo or somewhere.'

It's a popular misconception that a breakdown happens instantaneously.
Crack!
 – like a fissure shearing through an ice-floe. One day (so the theory goes) you're in one solid piece, smiling at the world, coping with your job, carrying on as normal, and the next you're a white-faced shaking blob of jelly, a gibbering wreck. It doesn't happen like that. What actually happens is that you carry the smile around with you on a stick, you ‘cope' with your job, you behave as any
normal person would, but with each day that passes you're wearing yourself to a finer and finer point, like the sharp, brittle point of a pencil. And then what happens is that one ordinary day, simply and undramatically, you
snap
.

People say, ‘Amazing. He changed overnight – just like that!' What they've seen is the surface fissure, cracking your personality in two. What they haven't seen are the stresses and tensions and slow grinding forces at work underneath, and they haven't seen these because you've taken immense pains to keep the facade intact. You've carried the smile on a stick around with you, pretending to hear and comprehend what people are saying to you, and you've mouthed words back at them. The months after Susan died remained a blur to me even now, a blank on the map. I must have soldiered bravely on, I supposed. I was very brave. Everyone must have thought I had come to terms with my grief, and it came as a shock to them when the pencil point broke without any warning. Snapped clean off.

Even then it was a quiet break. No histrionics. All very civilised. At least that's how I remember it, from what I do remember. I think I sat in a chair a lot and didn't move. There was no reason to. Well, yes, I suppose there were reasons to move, to act, to live, but they had ceased to have any significance.

We each of us invent our own version of the truth. I had invented a brother who didn't exist because I had to have a purpose for my journey, to explain my presence to her, and it just popped out, a harmless little lie, as they sometimes do when we're trapped in a situation.

Diane Locke struck me as an unusual woman. Had she really no qualms at all about picking up a hitch-hiker on a country road at nightfall? Maybe that's how she dealt with life, boldly and directly and on her own terms, blithely ignoring the screaming banner headlines and paranoid television documentaries about the millions of rapist murderers roaming the land. I envied that boldness, that strength, if that's what it was. She had told me she was divorced, and I had the impression she was unattached, and I suppose I was attracted to her. In a foolish fantasy, brought on by tiredness and wine, I pictured the two of us, stranded here together, upstairs in one of the bedrooms of Craddock's Coaching House, lying back on a rumpled
bed after making love and looking at the sloping plaster ceiling and warped black beams curving down over the attic window. We could hear the rush and splash of cars in the rain and dark outside. She told me all about her sad life and I told her all about mine. Such things do happen, and not only in books, but needless to say this didn't. She rang a taxi firm in Keswick and they sent out a car.

Going up the three carpeted steps into the bar I stupidly stumbled in my clumsy boots and lurched against a broad back in a tweed jacket. The owner of the broad back happened to have a pint to his mouth, and he swung round, spluttering, a fringe of foam on his brown moustache, lager dripping from his chin. A woman's voice said tartly, ‘Heavens, now they let tramps in here,' and there was a ponderous silence.

‘Are you damn well
drunk?
the man asked, making it sound like leprosy. He was over six feet tall, built like a rugby player, his wet fingers wrapped round the pint glass, which was almost empty.

I tried to say it was my fault, and how sorry I was, and perhaps I slurred my words, or it could have been my appearance that outraged him.

‘I'll say it was your bloody fault, of course it was. Look at my bloody shirt, you bloody imbecile. What's the matter with you?'

‘He smells,' the woman's voice said. ‘Disgusting.'

‘Say you're sorry.'

‘I've said it.'

The man pushed me in the chest. ‘Get out! You're a bloody menace.'

‘I did apologise. It was an accident.'

‘What are you doing here anyway?' one of the man's male companions asked rudely. ‘Find yourself a doss-house.' The woman shrieked with laughter and covered her mouth.

I had some loose change in my pocket. I fumbled for it, intending to pay for his drink, and the other man said, ‘Watch it, Kev, he's going for his knife.'

The big man held the pint glass to one side and hit me with his other fist. It felt like a sandbag. I knocked my head against the leaf of a table and lay there dazed. I heard Diane Locke say, ‘What the hell's that for, you pompous overgrown schoolyard bully.'

The landlord bent over me and yanked me to my feet. ‘I'm not having any disturbances here. You've paid, so get out. Leave my customers to have their drinks in peace.'

‘Are you serious?' Diane Locke said. ‘This man hit my friend—'

‘I'm not concerned about that. Come on, out you go. I said out. Now.'

Diane Locke turned furiously and picked up my bundle of stuff from under a chair. As we were going out Kev was being congratulated for standing no nonsense and the woman was saying, ‘Typical, that's what it's coming to these days. Riff-raff everywhere.'

I had a couple of loose teeth and he must have split my gum because I had a thick salty taste in my mouth. I didn't mind the incident so much, except for the fact that the landlord and the people in the bar would have reason to remember, should anyone inquire, the pale man in the shabby overcoat and ridiculous boots. Stupid to have gone into the pub in the first place and taken the risk, but it was too late now.

In the car Diane Locke muttered ‘Oaf!' under her breath, and then said nothing more. She had turned down the hood of her anorak and was stretched out beside me, resting her head on the back of the seat. From the corner of my eye I could make out the ghostly outline of her face and her long pale exposed neck.

I dabbed at my mouth and noticed that my hand was trembling. I was desperately tired of course, but it was more that I was unused to people – strangers – showing kindness towards me. I didn't know how to cope with it. I couldn't understand it. Some of the people in the sanatorium (a few) had been kind, but it was professional, dutiful, the brisk smile that could be switched on and off like a lamp. And there had been those who were not so kind.

The house was tall and narrow and made of granite, standing alone along a single-track dirt road that was hemmed in by conifers. Moonlight gleamed on the surface of a lake below through the dense, upright, slender trunks. I saw a light inside the house, and a shadow moved across a downstairs window as the car turned, crunching, on the small area of gravel by the front door, which was set in a small porch with a steep slate roof.

‘You got me wondering for a minute,' said a man's voice as we went inside. ‘It didn't sound like the trusty rusty old Datsun. Hello—?'

She introduced us. Graham Locke was about the same height as his daughter but he seemed smaller, almost shrunken. He had rather wild greying hair. One eye (the left) was a dead glazed blue that I tried to avoid staring at as we shook hands but which drew my gaze like a magnet.

‘Peter got stranded, so I've invited him to stay the night.'

As if this happened all the time and wasn't anything to get fussed over, Graham Locke waved aside my mumbled, abject apologies about the inconvenience and how grateful I was, etcetera. His daughter explained about the car as he shuffled ahead of us into the living-room. He shrugged his sloping shoulders under a worn blue cardigan that was buttoned out of sequence so that there was a spare hole at the top and a redundant button at the bottom. It made him look lopsided. She didn't say ‘Dad' or ‘Father,' I noticed, but called him Graham. After a minute she went off to the kitchen to make tea.

The room was quite small and musty-smelling – made smaller and mustier by being filled with books. They were stacked everywhere, on every flat surface, piled on the floor in precarious columns, spilling out
of cardboard boxes. We sat amongst them, me on the chintz-covered sofa, like two librarians in a stockroom. A gas fire hissed behind a tarnished brass fender. There was no TV set, no stereo system, just an old-fashioned radio with a fretted speaker in the shape of
fleur-de-lis
, the out-of-date station wavelengths preserved on a circular dial behind yellowing perspex.