The Calling (8 page)

‘Is she hot?’

Henry reaches into the cot, arranges Emma’s limbs so that he’s able to take the temperature under her armpit. Patrick is revolted by how lifeless and doll-like she seems.

‘Ninety-four,’ says Henry. ‘It’s low. Fuck.’

‘She seems really shaky.’

Henry has noticed Emma’s quivery chin and shaky hands. But now her entire body seems to be shivering.

‘A bottle isn’t the same,’ Henry says. ‘We need a wet nurse.’

There is a silence.

‘Could you do it?’ Patrick says.

‘Me?’

‘Please, Dad. Yeah.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because I’d be embarrassed.’

Henry’s not a big man but he’s well-groomed and vicious as a mink. ‘And how do you think it would look if I did it, eh? You chinless little spastic. How would that fucking look?’

‘Please,’ says Patrick.

Henry shushes him through his teeth, then shoves him onto the upstairs landing.

He gently shuts the bedroom door.

Then he grabs Patrick’s hair and rams Patrick’s head into the wall.

Patrick staggers around. He’s confused. Henry cuffs him round the face a few times, then tosses him to the floor.

‘Just take some of the money,’ he says, ‘and fucking do it.’

Zoe and Mark met just over a year ago. He works for Liberté Sans Frontière; he was her designated liaison on the Munzir Hattem case.

Mark’s handsome; slightly bohemian in tweed and cords; laid-back and sincere; a little earnest sometimes.

The fourth time they met, he offered to buy her lunch. They sat somewhere outside, watching people go past.

She talked about John.

She always talks about John.

In the end, Mark gave up and joined in. ‘So how did you two get together?’

‘How does anyone get together?’

‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘My ex-wife and I were childhood sweethearts.’

‘No!’

‘Yes!’

‘That’s so
sweet
.’

‘We went to primary school together,’ Mark said, ‘Stockwood Vale Primary. Emily Edwards. She had a ponytail. She could climb trees. All of it. The full package.’

‘So she was your first and only?’

‘Oh, God no. No, no, no. We went out for about, I don’t know, three years? Four years? Split up when sixth form came along. She got a bit political. Ban the Bomb, Socialist Workers. Greenham Common.’

He laughed to remember it.

A flicker of shared sadness passed between them. Zoe wanted to reach out and touch the back of his hand, to give comfort and to take it.

Instead, she flicked back her hair, stirred her latte. ‘So what happened?’

‘Oh, we met again. This is years later. By coincidence really, some New Year’s Eve bash in Brighton. And when we saw each other it was just like old times. She’d gone through her phase and out the other side. And I’d gone through mine.’

‘And what phase is this?’

He shrugged, sheepish. ‘Echo and the Bunnymen, basically.’

‘Echo and the what now?’

‘Bunnymen. You don’t know the Bunnymen?’

‘To my knowledge, I’ve never even set eyes on a Bunny Man.’

‘You ever hear of Eric’s?’

‘No.’

‘It was a club,’ he said. ‘In Liverpool, this was. Elvis Costello, I saw him there. The Clash. Joy Division. The Banshees. The Buzzcocks. You never heard of the Buzzcocks?’

She shook her head.

He sang her a few bars of ‘Ever Fallen in Love With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve’
.

Realizing, he trailed off. There was an awkward moment.

‘It’s a good song,’ he said.

Zoe got the bill and they stepped into the autumn, bundled up in their coats.

Mark said, ‘I don’t feel like going back yet.’

She said, ‘Nor me.’

So they walked to the park, found a bench and sat down. She perched on the edge, spine straight. Mark sprawled, took tobacco from a flat tin in his pocket and began to roll a cigarette. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Not at all. Blow the smoke my way.’

‘You a smoker?’

‘Occasional.’

‘I can roll you one, if you like.’

They sat in silence while he rolled her a cigarette, then passed it to her. She placed it in her mouth. The faint burn of unlit tobacco.

He produced a lighter and she leaned into him, smelling him, then sat back, puffing on her first roll-up since she was a student. She liked the taste and the smell of it, wondered how it went with these clothes, these shoes, this hair.

‘So how long did it last?’ she said, picking a thread of tobacco from the tip of her tongue, aware that he was watching her do it.

‘What, me and Emily? Eleven years, all in.’

‘Kids?’

‘There’s Stephen. He’s sixteen. Chloe’s nine. They live with their mum. You?’

‘Me and John? God, no.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘What does what mean?’

‘That tone.’

‘I don’t know. Did I use a tone?’

‘You definitely did. There was definitely a tone in use.’

She snorted, then covered her nose with the back of her hand, embarrassed. Mark was grinning at her.

She said, ‘The thought of it. Me and John with kids.’

‘What’s so mad about that?’

‘We agreed not to. Back when we were kids ourselves.’

‘Really? How long have you known him?’

‘Since the Big Bang.’

It was supposed to sound funny, but it came out sad. She watched the pigeons for a while. Then she said, ‘We met at university.’

‘Same course?’

‘No. I was doing law, obviously. He was postgrad in English.’

She tucked her chin into the warmth of her coat and smiled to think of it, just as she sometimes did when flicking through old photographs.

‘We only met because we were both doing this elective course in comparative religion. I sat next to him in this tiny little lecture theatre. Everybody there already knew each other except me and John. I knew him by reputation.’

‘And what reputation was that?’

‘He’s very tall,’ she said, self-conscious as a schoolgirl. ‘Very strong. Very handsome. And very, very intense.’

She laughed out loud, delighted and liberated to be talking about it. ‘And it was like, all the girls fancied him and he didn’t even notice them, y’know? And the more he didn’t notice them, the more they fancied him. He used to make girls do the stupidest things around him, really clever, brilliant young women who should have known better, behaving like idiots to get his attention. And he never noticed.’

‘Everybody notices.’

‘Swear to God. It wasn’t even arrogance. It was a kind of . . . myopia.’

‘And you liked that?’

‘I thought it was endearing.’

‘Not, like, a challenge?’

‘God, no.’

This time, they both laughed.

Mark said, ‘So how did you . . . y’know. Get together?’

She smoked the roll-up to its last quarter-inch, then squeezed it between her fingernails.

‘There wasn’t like a
moment
,’ she said. ‘We met in that lecture and kind of drifted out for a coffee afterwards. Neither of us asked the other. Or that’s how I remember it. We just sat in the café and chatted. I told him everything there was to tell about myself – which at the time wasn’t all that much.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Twenty? So girls’ school, sixth form, gap year, university. It felt like a lot of life experience at the time. So I tell him this, all about myself. Then I ask him about himself and he tells me about books. As if he’s made up of all these books he’s read, or was going to read. And later on, he walks me home. I didn’t question it for a minute. And I’ll tell you one thing about John: if you’re a twenty-year-old girl and you’re not that knowledgeable in the ways of the world and you live in a dodgy area, walking home with him, you never felt so safe. And he stops outside my door and says,
This is you, then?
And I say,
This is me
. And I’m thinking,
Kiss me you arsehole, kiss me or I’m going to die on the spot
.’

‘And did he?’

‘No. He just slouches and gives me this nod – he’s got this shaggy-dog nod he does sometimes. Then he digs his hands in his pockets and walks off.’

‘Well played, that man.’

‘Except it wasn’t,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t a tactic. I swear! It was just him. That’s who he was. Is. Whatever.’

And then a melancholy descended on her – as it always did when she thought of that boy and that girl. The thought of John Luther, twenty-two, slouching off without kissing her. And the lightness in her heart that night; how she couldn’t sleep and couldn’t believe herself: serious, level-headed, hard-working Zoe, who’d slept with two men in her entire life, one long-term school boyfriend, as a kind of parting gift, and one slightly older man she met on her gap year.

It wasn’t in her nature to lie in bed wondering what a boy might be doing right
now
, right this second. But she spent the whole night like that.

And she spent the next few days pretending she wasn’t trying to manufacture ways to bump into him in the corridor, the English department, the refectory.

Sprawled on that park bench, looking at the pigeons, Mark said, ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah,’ said Zoe. ‘Sorry. Miles away.’

He stretched his arms. ‘Best be getting back.’

‘I don’t want to go to work,’ she groaned, stretching her neck. ‘I want to take the day off. I’m tired.’

‘We could play hooky,’ said Mark. ‘Go to the pictures or something. I haven’t been to the pictures for ages. Especially not in the afternoon.’

‘Me neither.’

‘We should totally do it,’ he said. ‘Say we’re in a meeting. Go to the pictures. Grab a Chinese afterwards.’

‘I’d love to,’ she said. ‘But no.’

So he slipped his tobacco tin into his pocket and they strolled back to work.

In her memory they were arm in arm, although of course that can’t be right. Not yet. Not then.

That afternoon, she’d been distracted and clumsy. She spilled a cup of coffee over her desk.

Just by sitting there, laughing at the past, she’d felt that her John, that boy, was nothing more than a memory.

He’d catch her sometimes, after one glass of wine too many. She’d be tearful, going through their old photos again.

‘Look at my hair,’ she’d say. Or, ‘Christ, look at those boots. What was I thinking?’

Or she’d say, ‘God, remember that flat? The one on Victoria Road?’

And Luther would oblige her by flicking through the albums, unaware that the man looking at the photos was not the boy they pictured.

Somewhere along the line, that boy had joined the dead and Zoe had spent years waving to him from a far shore, trying to call him back.

And now it’s not even lunchtime on this strange day a year later and she lies naked on a hotel bed with Mark North in the warm afterglow of orgasm.

She nuzzles his neck, kisses him. He turns, kisses her.

She knows she’ll feel guilty. She’ll get up and walk naked to the shower and walk back and dry herself and Mark will watch; of course he will – he’s going to watch her do these everyday things because here and now everything she does is fascinating, vertiginous, magical. Just as everything he does is fascinating and magical to her.

She’ll towel herself in front of this man who has just come inside her, twice. And she’ll dress: underwear and tights and shirt and suit and shoes, and she’ll toy with her hair and reapply her make-up. She’ll make an appointment with the doctor to pick up the morning-after pill because neither of them had been planning this and neither had thought to pop into the chemist and buy condoms.

The morning-after pill may give her a headache and sore breasts and it may nauseate her; she’ll have to think of a good lie and practise it over and over again until she no longer thinks of it as untrue. That’s the only way to lie with any success to the man she married.

She’ll kiss Mark goodbye and because she knows now that their bodies fit, there’ll be no awkwardness between them. She likes his smell, the hint of fresh tobacco in his sweat; the few grey hairs on his chest, the scar on his upper arm.

She can feel it all, like the faint foreshadow of tomorrow’s hangover throbbing through the bright white glare of dancing drunk.

But all she feels right now is the satisfaction of being fascinated. And of being fascinating.

When, reluctantly, she gets out of bed and walks naked to the shower she doesn’t cry and she doesn’t laugh. She just washes herself and tries not to think.

Paula’s been on the game more than twelve years, during which time she’s sold pretty much all she has to sell. But she didn’t truly find her niche until she fell into the erotic lactation game. That was a few months after Alex was born.

Now she trades under the name Finesse. Compared to some of the crap she went through when she was younger, it’s easy money; she gets to spend her working hours in a clean little flat, and most of her lactophiliacs are long-term customers, middle-aged men who like to engage in what they call Adult Nursing Relationships. Sometimes they like to go the whole hog and assume the role of a breastfeeding infant, complete with nappies.

Some men like to have breast milk sprayed onto them as they masturbate. One or two like her to express into a manual pump as they watch and wank themselves off. They take the milk home to drink it or cook with it or do God knows what with it. Paula doesn’t really care; what harm can a little bit of milk do to anyone?

A very small minority of her clients are lesbian. She even has a lesbian couple. They like to latch on to a nipple each and nurse before doing their thing.

Paula doesn’t judge. She just gets on with it; takes her Domperidone, her Blessed Thistle, her red raspberry leaf, and counts her blessings.

So she’s surprised to see this sweet-looking young man standing in her doorway, telling her that Gary Braddon’s recommended her.

Braddon’s one of these tough-looking men, all tattoos and shaved heads, but he’s a gentle soul really, a softy. Loves his dogs, loves his milky boobs to kiss and nibble and suck.

Paula assesses the kid. He’s skinny, nervy. He smells not unpleasantly of fresh earth. She can see how he might be a friend of Gary’s. So she asks him in.