The Shadows in the Street (5 page)

‘I’m not saying anything.’

‘It was one in the morning, it was pissing with rain. What was I supposed to do, tell him to sleep in the ditch?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s not that bad.’

‘Yes, he is, Marie, he
is
that bad. What are you thinking? Is your mother there as well?’

‘No. She’s not been back for weeks.’ Marie stirred more sugar into her dark tea. ‘Probably dead and a fat lot I care.’

Her mother was a drunk and a junkie and another one sponging off Marie, but harmless next to Jonty.

‘Not your mother, Marie,’ Abi said. ‘You don’t mean that.’

‘You don’t know anything.’

‘I know one thing. I’m getting out of it.’

‘Out of what?’

Abi turned to check on the buggy. Frankie had pulled the blanket up over his face.

‘What’re you on about?’

‘What the fuck do you think?’

‘Oh. Yeah, right.’

‘I mean it.’

‘Course you do. And then what? Get a proper job?’

‘Maybe. Maybe go to college.’

Marie spluttered so that the mouthful of tea sprayed over her coat and the table.

‘Why shouldn’t I do that? I got four GCSEs, didn’t I?’

‘Listen,’ Marie put her hand briefly on top of Abi’s own until Abi pulled it back. ‘College costs money, and what would you do with the kids? College isn’t for people like us.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘I do. And for you.’

‘There’s a nursery. They look after them there.’

‘What, free?’

Abi bent her head and stared into her mug because she had no answers and because she wasn’t about to let Marie make her feel stupid. She didn’t know how much it cost or if the kids could go to the college nursery or what she would do even supposing she got in, she hadn’t made plans like that, you couldn’t, you didn’t.

‘Here, did you know they raided a house in Bevham? Took loads of girls and then they went on to another, some flat, got the pimps, well, a couple of them. Dawn raid. It was on the news, cops battering the door down and yelling. Everybody yelling.’

Abi raised her head. ‘So maybe we get our streets back for a bit, till they ship in another load of illegals and it all starts over.’

Frankie woke, and as he woke, let out a wail and flailed his arm across Mia’s face so that she wailed as well.

‘I better go.’

‘See you later.’

‘Maybe. I dunno. I don’t want to leave these two with Hayley, I can’t trust her.’

‘You got someone else lined up?’

‘I told you –’ Abi manoeuvred the buggy in the small space between the tables – ‘I’m packing it in.’

Marie looked at her, her face half a sneer, half a question.

‘See you,’ she said.

Abi slammed the café door without responding, but Marie was peering through the window, wiping the steam away with her arm. Staring.

‘I mean it,’ Abi mouthed at her.

She stopped to pull the blanket round the kids, wipe Mia’s mouth.

It was as if saying it could make it happen, which it couldn’t, but it could make her listen to herself and try to believe it.

When she got back, she’d check the money and then she’d take half and put it in the post office, now, today. She had said she would give it up, always said so, and meant it, only somehow, now, she meant it more.

It had started to rain. She pulled up the collar of her denim jacket and walked faster. Frankie was grizzling. The buggy didn’t have a cover and the blanket would be soaked by the time they got back, but she knew there was over an hour left on the electric, she could put the fan heater on to dry things.

Abi felt a dart of something run through her, something she recognised after a moment as a sort of excitement. It caught her off guard. She had glimpsed something ahead of her, something about her future.

Let Marie think what she wanted.

Seven

June Petrie had an irritating habit of whistling slightly under her breath to signal the start of coffee and tea breaks, and the lunch hour. It was perfectly possible that she did not know she was doing it, and more than likely that she had no idea how close Leslie Blade sometimes came to attacking her because of it.

Usually he went outside to eat or, if it was raining, to the staffroom. But once the college heating went on in the middle of October, he took his lunch box down into the basement stacks, where the pipework warmed the whole area and he was usually undisturbed. But occasionally, because the lunch break was staggered, other librarians had to come down in search of a book, even among the old stock that was housed here, and then he felt acutely self-conscious, found sitting on a high stool with his sandwiches and fruit and plastic cup of tea spread out on the ledge in front of him. The basement windows were always slightly grimy, but they only looked onto a side alley leading to the stores. He was perfectly happy with that, not wanting a view as he ate and read his paper. When librarians came, they never spoke to him. They walked along until they had located the required book and then walked out again.

Only June Petrie sometimes came, not to find a book, but to find him and only June Petrie whistled so irritatingly under her breath.

‘Mind if I join you, Leslie?’

Yes, he thought. Yes, I mind, yes, yes, yes, and yes, stop whistling under your breath, yes, yes.

‘Of course.’

Meaning, of course I mind, but that was not how she chose to take it.

She settled down at the bench, exuding her lunch vapours of Bovril and cheese.

‘Tuna?’

Leslie nodded.

‘I don’t care for fish.’

How often had she said it? How often had he promised himself that if she said it again he would kill her?

He smiled slightly and turned the page of his newspaper. But she had ruined that too.

She opened a packet of crisps and now the smell of chemical onion puffed out.

‘I wanted to catch you because we had a committee meeting last night to vote on the final choice.’

He turned his head away from the onion smell.

‘It’s
The Mikado
! I can’t tell you how pleased I am. There was a strong movement for
Ruddigore
on the grounds that it wasn’t often done, but there is a very good reason why. It isn’t often done because it isn’t really very good.’

‘No?’

‘Not one of the best by a long chalk.’

Where did that come from? He stopped reading about the plans to convert the Old Gaol into workshops to go over it in his mind.
Not by a long chalk
. Sport, it must come from sport, surely.

‘Anyway, it isn’t
Ruddigore
, it’s
The Mikado
.’

Or some old taproom term? Chalk marks on beer barrels? Why did he think it might be that?

He took the second half of his tuna sandwich out of the polythene bag and bit neatly into it.

‘You know, you really should join us, Leslie. I’ve been saying it for ages I know, but with
The Mikado
coming up I don’t see how you can bear to refuse.’

‘I did see it once,’ he said. ‘Some years ago now.’

‘And?’

‘I’m afraid I remember very little about it, June.’

‘But you enjoyed it?’

‘I don’t remember that either.’

‘Of course you did. How could anybody not enjoy
The Mikado
? Once you heard the tunes again it would all come back to you. Do think about it, Leslie.’

‘I can’t sing. I’ve said so before. I can’t sing. Or play any instrument. What use would I be?’

‘There are plenty of jobs backstage. We always need extra hands.’

Why did she do this to him? Twice a year, it seemed, she sought him out in these book stacks, barging in on his lunch hour, to try and persuade him to join the Lafferton Savoyards, choosing to forget that he told her each time that he could not sing or play an instrument and did not wish to lug scenery.

‘You do need to get out, have a life, you know.’

She had a small, pale mole on the side of her nose. He would have liked to take a razor blade to it, slice it off, watch the blood flow.

He turned the page of his newspaper but he had come to Classifieds and Property.

‘I have a perfectly happy life, thank you.’

‘Meet new people.’

She didn’t listen. She never listened. He could have used a chain of obscenities, shouted them into her face one after the other, and she would wait until he had paused and then continue, telling him that his mother would be glad if he joined something, she could surely not expect him to give up a social life for her. June Petrie had made it her business to find out as much as she could about him and about his mother, dripping small questions like drops onto a stone over the months and years, wearing him down.

Well, she had found out little enough.

‘You might have a voice, anyway. You don’t know till you try. You might surprise yourself.’

He folded the empty sandwich bag and took out a small bunch of seedless grapes. June Petrie ate the last of her onion crisps, making a loud rasping sound.

Today, tomorrow, or the next day, he would kill her.

‘You know where we are, the Baptist Hall. You know where that is.’ It was not a question. ‘Thursdays at seven, until it gets nearer the production, then it’s Thursdays and Fridays.’

Leslie stood up. He folded his paper. He crunched down viciously on the last grape.

‘Then I’m afraid that’s that, June,’ he said. ‘I’m busy every Thursday and Friday evening. What a pity.’

She came fast behind him, down the stacks, through the swing doors, up the concrete staircase. She would not do so yet, but before long Leslie Blade knew that she would ask him, in some roundabout way, what exactly it was that he did, where he went, every Thursday and Friday evening. He smelled the onion crisps as she panted up the stairs. He could make one slight move, turn sharply and push. He pictured it, her soft marshmallow body tumbling backwards down the flight of concrete to the bottom.

She had started to whistle ‘A Wandering Minstrel’ softly, under her breath.

Eight

Dear Cat

I’m sorry it’s been so long and I feel bad about that, and about simply disappearing and not telling anyone what I was doing and why. But the truth is, I didn’t know myself. I was confused and uncertain and I couldn’t talk about it. In the end, I decided I needed to get right away so I came here – a remote and very strange and beautiful part of Nepal and an orphanage in the foothills of the mountain range. (See enclosed photo.) I am helping generally, teaching a little, spending much time in thought and self-assessment and prayer, and also exploring as much as I can – places, people, culture, life – it is all so totally unlike anything I have ever experienced.

I felt very constrained in Cambridge, and didn’t quite know which way to turn. I was enjoying my own work but found college life claustrophobic. And where else could I have gone? Not back to London, and the convent wasn’t right – it for me or me for it. And I knew really that this sort of personal chaos – emotional and career was a hopeless place from which to launch into a relationship. Simon’s life and mine were never going to be anything but parallel, there seemed no real meeting points. I don’t think I was ever what he wanted and, I am sure, not what he needed.

I wish it had been different. I do miss England and I so miss my friends. My address is below. I can’t email as there is no connection but letters do arrive, if a little unpredictably, so I would love news of you and the children. I hope you are finding things easier, and I hope you are all right, though of course you cannot be. I think of you and you are in my prayers, and I send love.

Jane

Cat turned the photograph to the light. Snow-capped mountains. Mist. A few bent trees lower down the slopes. A pinkish light. Beautiful. Jane Fitzroy had simply evaporated from their lives for half a year – Cambridge said they had no forwarding details – and now she had reappeared here, in this remote, exotic and rather random place.

Cat shook her head. Jane was right, she and Simon would never have worked, if she was as unsettled and undecided as this – one minute a chaplain, then living among nuns, then doing medieval theology in a Cambridge college, but always unsure if this was ‘it’, the thing she most desired, the round hole into which she might fit, or if she was destined to be a square peg yet again. Whether she had loved Si or he her, Cat had no idea. They had seemed in some vague sense to be right together but Jane had too much baggage, life baggage, faith baggage and emotional baggage. Simon had the last. He did not need someone as complicated and unpredictable as Jane.

Cat set down the photograph. She would send a postcard – Lafferton Cathedral, a reminder, a bit of the past – but she did not feel able to write anything too personal or too revealing. Besides, she did not think that was what Jane wanted. Perhaps Jane would find herself in Nepal – how many had tried? But probably not, Cat thought. She was the kind of person who might walk into the farmhouse next week asking how one became a doctor.

Or not.

She put the card into a pigeonhole in her desk, wondering if Simon knew about Nepal, guessing not, unsure if he would even be interested. Jane Fitzroy was not a subject she had been able to broach with him.

The farmhouse was quiet, the older two children at school, Felix upstairs having his nap. Cat had cut down her GP work to three days, extended her hospice hours and hoped to do more, but before she did so she needed to do a further specialist course in palliative medicine. She should find out more about what that would entail, when, where, how – and could not summon up the energy to do so. Bereavement, she had discovered, was about many things, but one of those, and the one which few people seemed to know or warn about, was a long-lasting, overwhelming physical and mental tiredness. Even now, a year after Chris’s death, she felt exhausted for much of the time, with an exhaustion that seemed to be bone-deep and to bear no relation to whatever else she might have been doing or even to how much sleep she got. To start researching courses in palliative care, filling in application forms, reorganising her life around it, she needed an alertness and an energy she never seemed able to summon.