The Price of Love and Other Stories (17 page)

Banks couldn’t remember, but he was sure he must have. Best to agree, anyway. Stay on her wavelength. “Yes,” he said. “I know just what you mean.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.

“And it made me feel worthless,” she said. “The memory made me feel that my whole life was a sham, a complete waste of time, of any potential I once might have had. And it just seemed that there was no point in carrying on.” She shifted on the wall.

“Don’t!” Banks cried, moving forward.

She looked at him. He thought he could make out a faint smile. She appeared tired and drawn, but her face was a pretty one, he noticed. A slightly pointed chin and small mouth, but beautiful hazel eyes. Obviously, this was something her husband didn’t notice.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I was just changing position. My bum’s gone numb. The wall’s hard and cold. I just wanted to get more comfortable.”

She was concerned about comfort. Banks took that as a good sign. He was within two yards of her now, but he still wasn’t close enough to make a grab. At least she didn’t tell him to move back. “Just be careful,” he said. “It’s dangerous. You might slip.”

“You seem to be forgetting – that’s what I’m here for.”

“The memory,” said Banks. “That day at the pond. It’s something to cherish, surely? To live for?”

“No. It just suddenly made me feel that my life’s all wrong. Worthless. Has been for years. I don’t feel like
me
anymore. I don’t feel anything. Do you know what I mean?”

“I know. But this isn’t the answer.”

“I don’t know,” Brenda said, shaking her head then looking down into the swirling white of the chasm below. “I just feel so sad and so lost.”

“So do I, sometimes,” said Banks, edging a little closer. “Every Christmas since my wife left me for someone else and the kids grew up and moved away from home. But it doesn’t mean that you don’t feel anything. You said before that you felt nothing, but you do, even if it is only sadness.”

“So how do you cope?”

“Me? With what?”

“Being alone. Being abandoned and betrayed.”

“I don’t know.” Banks was desperate for a cigarette, but remembered that he had stopped smoking ages ago. He put his hands in his pockets. The snow was really falling now, obscuring the view. He couldn’t even see the ground.

“Did you love her?” Brenda asked.

The question surprised Banks. He had been quizzing her, but all of a sudden, she was asking about him. He took that as another good sign. “Yes.”

“What happened?”

“I suppose I neglected her,” said Banks. “My job … the hours … I don’t know. She’s a pretty independent person. I thought things were OK, but they weren’t. It took me by surprise.”

“I’m sure David thinks everything is fine as long as no one ruffles the surface of his comfortable little world. And I know he doesn’t think I’m attractive. Were you unfaithful?”

“Once. A long time ago. I always felt guilty about it. And many years later, my wife left me for another man. Had a baby with him.”

“She had a baby with another man?”

“Yes. I mean, we were divorced and they got married and everything. My daughter’s spending Christmas with them.”

“And you?”

Was she starting to feel sorry for him? If she did, then perhaps it would help to make her see that she wasn’t the only one suffering, that suffering was a part of life, and you just had to put up with it and get on with things. “By myself,” he said. “My son’s abroad. He’s in a rock group. The Blue Lamps. They’re doing really well. You might even have heard of them.”

“David doesn’t like pop music.”

“Well … they’re really good.”

“The proud father. My daughter’s a stuck-up, social-climbing bitch who’s ashamed of her mother.”

Banks remembered Janet Mainwaring’s reaction to the description of her mother as missing: an embarrassment. “People can be cruel,” he said. “They don’t always mean what they say.”

“But how do you cope?”

Banks found that he had edged closer to her now, within a yard or so. It was almost grabbing range. That was a last resort, though. If he wasn’t quick enough, she might flinch and fall off as he reached for her. Or she might simply slip out of his hands. “I don’t know,” he said. “Christmas is a difficult time for all sorts of people. On the surface, it’s all peace and happiness and giving and family and love, but underneath … You see it a lot in my job. People reach breaking point. There’s so much stress.”

“But how do
you
cope with it alone? Surely it must all come back and make you feel terrible?”

“It does, sometimes. I suppose I seek distractions. Music.
Scrooge
.
Love Actually
– for Bill Nighy and Keira Knightley – and
David
Copperfield
, the one with the Harry Potter actor. I probably drink too much as well.”

“Daniel Radcliffe. That’s his name. The Harry Potter actor.”

“Yes.”

“And I’d watch
Love Actually
for Colin Firth.” She shook her head. “But I don’t know if it would work for me.”

“I suppose it’s all just a pointless sort of ritual,” said Banks, “but I’d still recommend it. The perfect antidote to spending Christmas alone and miserable.”

“But I wouldn’t be alone and miserable, would I? That’s the problem. I’d be with my family, and I’d still be bloody miserable.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I told you. Things can change. You can change things.” Banks leaned his hip against the wall. He was so close to her now that he could have put his arms around her and pulled her back, but he didn’t think he was going to need to. “Do it for yourself. Not for them. If you think your husband doesn’t love you, leave him and live for yourself.”

“Leave David? But where would I go? How would I manage? David has been my life. David and Janet.”

“There’s always a choice,” Banks went on. “There are people who can help you. People who know about these things. Counsellors, social services. Other people have been where you are now. You can get a job, a flat. A new life. I did.”

“But where would I go?”

“You’d find somewhere. There are plenty of flats available in Eastvale, for a start.”

“I don’t know if I can do that. I’m not as strong as you.” Banks noticed that she managed a tight smile. “And I think if I did, I would have to go far away.”

“That’s possible, too.” Banks reached out his hand. “For crying out loud, you can come and have Christmas dinner with
me
if you
want. Just let me help you.” The snow was coming down heavily now, and the area had become very slippery.

She looked at his hand, shaking her head and biting her lip.

“
Scrooge
?” she said.

“Yes. Alastair Sim.”

“I always preferred James Stewart in
It’s a Wonderful Life
.” Banks laughed. “That’ll do nicely too. I’ve got the DVD.”

“I couldn’t … you know … If I … Well, I’d have to go home and face the music.”

“I know that. But after, there’s help. There are choices.”

She hesitated for a moment, then she took hold of his hand, and he felt her grip tightening as she climbed off the wall and stood up.

“Be careful, now,” he said. “The ground’s quite treacherous.”

“Isn’t it just,” she said, and moved towards him.

W
e were meant to be getting some sleep, but how you’re supposed to sleep in a cold, muddy, rat-infested trench, when the uppermost thought in your mind is that you’re going to be shot first thing in the morning, is quite beyond me.

Albert Parkinson handed around the Black Cats to the four of us who clustered together for warmth, mugs of weak Camp Coffee clutched to our chests, almost invisible to one another in the darkness. “Here you go, Frank,” he said, cupping the match in his hands for safety, even though we were well below ground level. I thanked him and inhaled the harsh tobacco, little realizing that soon I would be inhaling something far more deadly. Still, we needed the tobacco to mask the smell. The trench stank to high heaven of unwashed men, excrement, cordite, black powder and rotting flesh.

Now and then, distant shots broke the silence, someone shouted a warning or an order, and an exploding shell lit the sky. But we were waiting for dawn. We talked in hushed voices, and eventually the talk got around to what makes heroes of men. We all put in our twopenn’orth, of course, mostly a lot of cant about courage, patriotism and honour, with the occasional, begrudging nod in the direction
of folly and luck, but instead of settling for a simple definition, Joe Fairweather started to tell us a story.

Joe was a strange one. Nobody quite knew what to make of him. A bit older than the rest of us, he already had a reputation as one of the most fearless lads in our regiment. It never seemed to worry him that he was running across no man’s land in a hail of bullets; he seemed either blessed or indifferent to his fate. Joe had survived Ypres one and two, and now here he was, ready to go again. Some of us thought he was more than a little bit mad.

“When I was a kid,” Joe began, “about eleven or twelve, we used to play by the canal. It was down at the bottom of the park, through the woods, and not many people went there because it was a hell of a steep slope to climb back up. But we were young, full of energy. We could climb anything. There were metal railings all along the canal side, but we had found a loose one that you could lift out easily, like a spear. We always put it back when we went home so nobody would know we had found a way in.

“There wasn’t much beyond the canal in those days, only fields full of cows and sheep, stretching away to distant hills. Very few barges used the route. It was a lonely, isolated spot, and perhaps that was why we liked it. We used to forge sick notes from our mothers and play truant from school, and nobody was ever likely to spot us down by the canal.

“Not that we got up to any real mischief, mind you. We just talked, the way kids do, skimmed stones off the water. Sometimes, we’d sneak out our fishing nets and catch sticklebacks and minnows. Sometimes, we played games. Just make-believe. We’d act out stories from
Boy’s Own
, cut wooden sticks from the bushes and pretend we were soldiers on patrol.” Joe paused and looked around at the vague outlines of our faces in the trench, and laughed. “Can you believe it? We actually
played
at being soldiers. Little did we know …

“One day, I think it was June or July, just before the summer holidays, at any rate, a beautiful, sunny, still day, the kind that makes you
believe that only good things are going to happen, my friend Adrian and me were sitting on the stone bank, dipping our nets in the murky water, when we saw someone on the other side. I say ‘saw,’ but it was more like sensing a presence, a shadow on the water, perhaps, and we looked up and noticed a strange man standing on the opposite bank, watching us with a funny sort of expression on his face. I remember feeling annoyed at first, because this was our secret place, and nobody else was supposed to be there. Now this grown-up had to come and spoil everything.

“‘Shouldn’t you boys be at school?’ he asked us.

“There wasn’t much we could say to that, and I dare say we just fidgeted and looked shifty.

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone. What are you doing?’

“‘Just fishing,’ I said.

“‘Just fishing? What are you fishing for? There can’t be much alive down there in that filthy water.’

“‘Minnows and sticklebacks,’ I said.

“‘How old are you?’

“We told him.

“‘Do your parents know where you are?’

“‘No,’ I said, though I remember feeling an odd sensation of having spoken foolishly as soon as the word was out of my mouth. But it was too late to take it back.

“‘Why do you want to know?’ Adrian asked him.

“‘It doesn’t matter. Want to play a game with me?’

“‘No, thanks.’ We started to move away. Who did he think he was? We didn’t play with grown-ups; they were no fun. Besides, we’d been warned to stay away from strangers.

“‘Oh, I think you do,’ he said, and there was something about his voice that made the hackles on the back of my neck stand up. I glanced at Adrian, and we turned to look across the canal to where the man stood. When we saw the gun in his hand, both of us froze.

“He smiled, but it wasn’t a nice smile. ‘Told you so,’ he said.

“Now I looked at him closely for the first time. I was just a kid, remember, so I couldn’t say how old he was, but he was definitely a grown-up. A man. And he was wearing a sort of uniform, like a soldier, but it looked shabby and rumpled, as if it had been slept in. I couldn’t see the revolver very clearly, not that I’d have had any idea what make it was, as if that even mattered. All that mattered was that it was a gun, and that he was pointing it at us.

“Then, out of sheer nerves, I suppose, we laughed, hoping maybe it was all a joke and it was just a cap gun he was holding. ‘All right,’ Adrian said. ‘If you really want to play … ’

“‘Oh, I do,’ the man said. Then he pulled the trigger.

“It wasn’t as loud as I had expected, more of a dull popping sound, but something whizzed through the bushes beside me and dinged on the metal railing as it passed by. I felt deeply ashamed as the warm piss dribbled down my bare legs. Thankfully, nobody seemed to notice it but me.

“‘That’s just to show you that it’s a real gun,’ the man said, ‘and that I mean what I say. Do you believe me now?’

“We both nodded.

“‘What do you want?’ Adrian asked.

“‘I told you. I want to play.’

“‘Look,’ I said, ‘you’re frightening us. Why don’t you put the gun away? Then we’ll play with you. Won’t we, Adrian?’

“Adrian nodded. ‘Yes.’

“‘This?’ The man looked at his revolver as if seeing it for the first time. ‘But why should I want to put it away?’

“He fired again, closer this time, and a clod of earth flew up and stung my cheek. I was damned if I was going to cry, but I was getting close. I felt as if we were the only people for hundreds of miles, maybe the only people in the whole world. There was nobody to save us, and this lunatic was going to kill us after he’d had his fun. I didn’t
know why, what made him act like that or anything, but I just knew he was going to do it.