Lonely Hearts (12 page)

Mary straightened and looked at her mother, daughter, mother again. She turned away and began to put the cups back on the tray. “I suppose you’ll be going out later,” said her mother, as Mary went towards the kitchen.

“Yes, Mother, I shall be going out later.”

Mary smoothed down her gray skirt and reached around behind to lower the toilet seat. Sitting, she lifted her heeled shoes from the plastic bag she had been carrying and wiped a scuff mark from the upper of one of them with a sheet of toilet paper. Wriggling her feet down into them, she squashed the soft-soled flatties she’d been wearing into her handbag; the striped plastic bag she stuffed down behind the pipe that ran from the cistern to the bowl. She stood then, wincing as the back of her left shoe bit into her skin. Why hadn’t she remembered to bring a plaster that she could have put on beneath her tights? Now she would have to hope that whatever they did, she wouldn’t have to walk too far.

She flushed the toilet and unbolted the cubicle door.

Makeup bag resting on the narrow ledge—How did they expect you to balance anything on something that wasn’t wide enough for a cat to walk along?—Mary applied some blusher, wondering again how it was she could still have freckles around her nose this far into autumn.

Lipstick.

At least, she hadn’t had to go through this with her mother; the questioning she had had to endure all the time she was at secondary school and beyond. Where are you going? Who are you going to meet? Which pictures? And the hand that would reach out to smear Miners makeup across her face: don’t imagine that’s going to wash with me, young lady, you don’t cover yourself in this just to go to the Odeon with a girlfriend.

True or false, true or false, it had never mattered.

You can’t lie to me, I’m your mother.

Yes, mother. She pressed her lips together tightly and then pulled them apart, making a soft popping sound. Well, it’s just as well you no longer ask.

An ageless woman in a bulked-out coat like tinted sacking came in, pushing a small boy before her. “In there. Go in. In there, stupid!” The door slammed shut.

Mary slid the black brush into the mascara and lifted up her eyelid with a finger. That’s what she’d have me looking like, done-for and sexless. Like her. God, she’s not yet sixty herself. Doesn’t she ever think about it? Ever? Mary clicked the mascara shut, pulled a comb a few more times through the ends of her hair. Not that that was why she went with them. Men. It wasn’t for the sex, which was just as well because half the time there wasn’t much sex at all. Oh, there was the talk, that and a bit of last-minute poking and grabbing when it was all too late and any interest she might have had had fallen away somewhere between the awkward silences and obvious lies.

“So,” she addressed her reflection aloud, “it’s a good thing I’m not desperate for it, isn’t it?”

Behind her a toilet flushed, a door banged, and for a moment the woman’s eyes caught hers in the mirror.

“Look where you’re going,” she said to the boy. “You’re always under my feet.”

Mary zipped up her makeup bag and put it away. Checking her watch, she saw that she still had twenty minutes, which was as well for she always liked to be there first and waiting. That way she had the advantage: she was always the one to pick them out, make the approach. That was the only way she would have it. That bit of control. Besides which, if she didn’t like the look of them—the least little thing—she’d walk right off and leave them there. Wandering up and down, walk and turn, walk and stop, check the watch, the clock across the square, walk some more.

Once she’d come back more than two hours later and this whippet of a bloke had still been there, eyes glazed over, cigarette cupped in his hand, waiting in the slow fall of rain.

Tonight, though—Mary stepped out on to the street, pressing the button at the pedestrian crossing—she had a feeling it was going to be all right. The way he’d written, that had convinced her of that. Not full of himself, the way some were, making out like they were a cross between Sylvester Stallone and Shakespeare. He wasn’t a wimp, either—some of them sounded as if they’d gone down on their hands and knees before they set pen to paper.

And that was another thing. She turned down past the post office, thankful she didn’t have far to go, there was a blister coming up over her heel already. His writing. Sophisticated, that’s what she’d have to call it. Ink, too, real ink, not biro. Almost fancy. Well, nothing wrong with a man who was a bit fancy. Maybe he’d fancy her.

Crossing the square between the lager drinkers and the pigeons, Mary smiled: her fancy man.

She asked for a port and brandy and took it to her usual place, moving a stool along to the curve of the bar so that she had a good view of the door without being right on top of it. That way she had plenty of time to be sure. Behind her the drummer was unfastening his cases, beginning to assemble his kit. Mary sipped her drink and tried to ignore the faint itch of sweat just below her hairline. Relax, she told herself. Relax: you’ll know him when he comes.

Twelve

You didn’t only find dust in disused rooms: once, pulling out the empty whitewood chest, he had found a baby bird. Cocooned in a spider’s web and resting back on outspread wings, its beak and belly gave it the look of some prehistoric creature here in miniature. Days old, only hours. Carefully, he had prized the web from round about it, closed his mouth, and blown away the dust; when he cupped his hand beneath the bird and lifted it up, the wings disintegrated at his touch. Between the pages of a book he found a letter from his former wife which contained the words
for ever
. Tonight, searching for Bud, who had not appeared at the sound of cat food being scraped into bowls, he had picked from between some old magazines a picture postcard from Ben Riley.

Come on in
, the message had read,
the water’s fine!

On the front of the card, an expanse of land pushed back towards a range of mountains, snow at their peaks; the moon rising pale through a lot of sky. Not a sign of water anywhere the eye could see.

Resnick and Ben Riley had walked the beat together for the best part of two years. One Saturday in four they would walk down through the Meadows and over Trent Bridge, stand on the terraces, and watch their colleagues sitting below, helmets off and on the ground beside them. On the way back, Ben would drop into the cycle shop and discuss the comparative merits of machines and gears, while Resnick flipped through the new releases in the jazz specialists along the street. Now Arkwright Street had been pulled down and most of the small rows of adjoining terraces along with it. Where they used to stand to watch the Reds, others now sat in executive boxes with the televisions tuned to the racing. Resnick had started watching the team on the other side of the river. And Ben Riley was out in Montana.

Resnick supposed that was where he was.

At first there had been letters, postcards from trips Ben had made—Custer’s Battlefields; the Breaks of the Missouri; Glacier National Park; Chicago—and then, inevitably, Christmas greetings that arrived mid-January and for the past few years nothing at all.

On the way past the bathroom, Resnick heard a familiar, pathetic mewing. Pepper was curled asleep around the top of the laundry basket and, somehow, Bud had managed to get trapped inside it, pitifully tangled amongst Resnick’s soiled shirts.

On the way to the kitchen, the cat purring, nuzzling the crook of his arm, Resnick lifted the stylus back on to Johnny Hodges. Ben Riley, he was thinking, had been the best man at his wedding. Resnick set the cat down by his bowl and smiled: just as well somebody was.

He broke a couple of eggs into a bowl, added milk, forked butter into the bottom of a pan. He grated in some parmesan and opened the cupboard for the Tabasco sauce.
Do you ever do anything in the way of exercise? You’re starting to look a little plump
. Resnick tore the health club’s free offer into four and dropped the pieces into the bin. When the butter was beginning to sizzle up, he tipped in the egg mixture, stirred it round a couple of times and then, taking a carton of cream from the fridge, added a more than generous helping.

It was still only mid-evening and there was no point in getting to the club before eleven. At a sudden thought, he gave the eggs a stir, turned the gas low, and went to the phone.

Chris Phillips answered.

Resnick imagined that was who it was. He said: “Is Rachel there?”

“No, she’s at a meeting,” Phillips said.

Resnick said, “Oh,” wondering whether he should leave a message and ask her to call him, meet him later.

“Can I take a message?” Phillips said.

“No, it’s okay. Thanks.”

“Who shall I say called?”

“Em, Resnick. Charlie Resnick.”

“Didn’t you ring the other night?”

Resnick set down the phone. When he took his plate through to the living room, Johnny Hodges was still playing. “Satin Doll.” When he had started listening to jazz, Resnick had thought Hodges the best saxophonist in the world. Still, there were times when his sound was the only one that worked.

when I listen to Johnny Hodges

I am ashamed

to carry loss

like a sick-note

like a dream of sailing

Come on in, the water’s fine!
It didn’t matter that Ben Riley was somewhere on the prairie, that Rachel Chaplin wasn’t home: right now, Resnick felt better than all right.

There were nightclubs in the city where men had to wear a tie before they could gain admittance and the toilets were swabbed out three times of an evening. There was one with a style bouncer who checked you over carefully and if you were found to be wearing anything from Marks and Spencer or Top Shop they wouldn’t sell you a ticket. Resnick had heard rumors of another with a membership fee that was roughly equal to his monthly salary, where the furnishings were pure white and they played nothing but Frank Sinatra and Vic Damone.

The Stardust was squeezed between a pub and a stationery warehouse on one of the main roads through Resnick’s patch of inner city. The music was solid reggae and calls to complain about the insistent throb of bass were almost as consistent. Cabs lined the pavement between two and four. The sign above the cash desk announced that members had to show evidence of membership when entering, but nobody seemed overly concerned about dress code. Non-members were supposed to be signed in by a member but Resnick showed his warrant card instead.

At the far end of the room, a singer with a full beard and a brightly striped woollen hat was holding the microphone too close to his face. There were a few tables, but most of the clientele were on their feet—lining the bar, leaning back against the opposite wall, mostly twos and threes with an occasional male on his own, staring off into the middle distance, swaying lightly. Others were dancing. A sinewy black was winding his way around a woman in a vast velvet dress who turned through a small circle, never taking her eyes from his face. Four girls swayed around a pile of handbags. The majority of the men were Afro-Caribbean in origin; almost without exception the women were white and when Resnick first came to the city they would have worked in one or other of the hosiery factories that lined the road leading out through Kimberley and Eastwood towards Heanor. He wasn’t sure what they did now, these women. Even the old Players factory had been demolished now, the one on Prospect Street.

“Trouble?” The man running the bar was overweight and white.

“Guinness,” said Resnick, drawing in his stomach.

“Paying for it?”

Resnick placed a five-pound note on the counter and left the change where it lay. “Know a man named Warren?”

“Warren Oates.”

Resnick looked at him, the studied insolence in his eyes.

“Rabbit warren.”

Resnick scooped the change away and dropped it down into his pocket. He made his way slowly across the room, skirting round the handbag girls and waiting for a slim-hipped man with dreadlocks and a bright red and green skinny-ribbed jumper to finish dancing.

“Jackie, this here’s Detective Inspector Resnick.”

The woman blinked at him from a face that saw too little natural light. She turned with a shrug and moved away.

“New girlfriend?” Resnick asked, pleasantly enough.

“Slag,” said the man, leaning against the wall beside Resnick, head arched back, pelvis jutting out.

“I can see why you’re such a success with the ladies,” Resnick said. “It’s your natural sympathy and charm. That and the obvious respect you have.”

“You come to me for lessons?”

“Information.”

“Lessons cost.”

“Information comes free.”

“Who says?”

“It was free last time.”

“You shut it about that!” He was close now, close enough to smell the sweetness of the marijuana.

“You were only doing your duty.”

“Shut it!”

“An honest citizen.”

“I grassed.”

Each and every way, Resnick thought, enjoying the joke.

“What you grinning all over your face at?”

“You gave up somebody because it was in your own interests to do so. Someone who’d been putting girls on the streets you thought were yours to work. The right time, the right place and now he’s still waiting for parole.”

“You complaining?”

“Asking for more.”

“Get fucked!” Swiveling away.

“Warren,” Resnick said after him. He hesitated, half-turned.

“I need to talk with somebody called Warren.”

The man turned away again.

“Maybe, before I leave, I should get up on the mike and announce that you’re our newest recruit to the Neighborhood Watch.”

He didn’t stop walking, but he heard.

Resnick waited a while. There were other faces that he recognized; by that time more who recognized him, knew who and what he was. He began to count those in the club whom he’d arrested, seen sent down. At five, he stopped and went back to the bar. The woman, Jackie, was standing there and when he put down his empty glass she spat in it.