Veil of Darkness (2 page)

Suppose he comes home unexpectedly?

Suppose the gaffer lets him off early?

If he should catch her now…?

Her life is an agony of apprehension, with acts of contrition for every fault.

Just the thought of him returning home and finding nobody there is enough to make her cringe. Such disobedience. Such vile deviation. Such uncharacteristic deception. Trevor’s complexion, if compared to a cake, Kirsty would call underdone. It would have to be tested with a skewer. He would probably need another ten minutes. She imagines his currant-eyed, flabbergasted stare as he pulls himself up abruptly in his crumpled blue Gas Board overalls and senses that she’s gone. She sees his heavy legs placed apart and his thick hands on his hips as he calls suspiciously up the stairs and is met by continuing, heavy silence.

He has a habit of cracking his knuckles, of pulling his finger joints till they click. He likes to eat sausages raw, taking them straight from the fridge and sucking the meat from the skins. She is always amazed this has never killed him.

She imagines him all fired up, snarling quietly, ‘Where have you been all this time?’

She hears his sarcastic laugh. His small eyes flame with rage, as black and soulless as a cruising shark’s, as menacing as a pit bull on the prowl.

Then comes the slam of his fist on the table.

‘Goddamn it, you bitch.’ As his wrath turns to savagery and she tries to mash the potatoes as though nothing is wrong for the children’s sake, but with her nerves on edge, she wonders if she’ll have time to take them upstairs before it begins in earnest.

If it hadn’t been for the kids she might have become inured to it all, numb to the fear, immune to the pain, worthless, deserving nothing. Thank God, thank God for two children who love her.

And did Trev really love God? He went to confession often enough. So many times she had wished he would die or that she might be brave enough to kill him. She reminded herself that he was dying, that every day he grew nearer to death, and this gave her some crumbs of comfort. What would she put on his gravestone? ‘Here lies Trevor Hoskins, loving husband of Kirsty and much missed father of Jake and Gemma’? Or ‘Rot in Hell, you bastard’? She imagined the smell of decaying flesh to be similar to the stink of putty.

She wished he would die or win the lottery, either one wouldn’t matter. But she feared that his numbers wouldn’t come up because, oddly, she has noticed that lottery winners have a certain look, as if they were born knowing some secret, a look which Trev doesn’t have. If he’d won the lottery he would have left her, of that she has no doubt. He would have lived in the fast lane and killed himself with cars or women or booze.

He drinks Southern Comfort and lemonade.

He won’t eat crisps, only pork scratchings. Perhaps that is why Kirsty loathes even the smell of pork and can only think of pigs in fear in the slaughter house.

He decided to buy his council house and his temper grew worse with the strain of it all, especially in the recession.

The rain comes down with full force as Kirsty catches the second bus that will take her to Lime Street Station, and there she will have to wait an hour for the train to Cornwall. While she waits she might have a coffee, frittering away her time and her money, something she hasn’t done in years, and buy a magazine, or even a couple of brand-new books to keep her company during the journey. The centre provided the funds she needed; she will pay them back as soon as she can. She will no longer have to account for every penny she spends, or beg for money for the children’s clothes. Once she came home with the wrong brand of mustard and ended up with it all over her face, stinging her eyes, choking her. Nerve gas. Now she will have to learn to make choices. But the thought that he might catch her up, guess at her plans, unearth some clue by using a devilish form of interpersonal communication, pad stealthily onto the station platform and lay a patient, malicious hand on her shoulder, this thought she must dismiss. She cannot live her life with a fugitive’s instincts in every fibre of her being. Her eyes water with the strain of staring out into the dim evening, ludicrously seeking him out from the flocks of umbrella-slick strangers, while willing the bus to move faster, the traffic to ease, her head to stop aching.

Trevor will not lie down and take it. No way will he accept defeat. No doubt he will be forming some plan even now. No doubt he will make up some hackneyed tale of a runaway wife with a mental condition who’s a danger to herself and her children, so plausible that they will believe him and activate some search before she has time to leave the city. ‘You’re hysterical,’ he would often mock her. ‘You’re off your bleeding head.’ As if he despised her sanity just as much as her happiness. Thank God the children aren’t with her. At least the children are safe, and if everything works out well they will soon be together.

She had often had wild thoughts of running away, but common sense always came to her rescue. If she was going to go then she had to go properly, she had to make sensible plans or he would find her.

Hence the idea of Cornwall. The centre helped her to find a job. She used to sneak there while the kids were at school, taking time off work for the dentist. She almost lost her job through doing that. Her supervisor, Mrs Graham, said she would dock her wages, the dentist was not for working hours. But the girls in the food department rebelled and she told Mrs Graham it was root-canal work and she had to have several appointments. The Burleston Hotel, a Victorian pile with its own private cove, owned by a Colonel Vincent Parker, offered summer work and a self-contained cottage next winter. They held their local interviews in a suite at the Adelphi Hotel. Kirsty, self-confidence nil, never thought she would get picked, but she did. Kerry at the centre tried her best to persuade them to let Kirsty have the cottage at once, without going into her personal details, but the Burleston Hotel said it was let and would not be free till the winter. It was an offer too good to miss. A battered woman she might be, but Kirsty abhorred the thought of a hostel.

He rolls his own fags. His first two fingers are stained yellow. He keeps his tobacco in a genuine old Bisto tin that he reckons is worth some money.

He won’t use tissues. Trevor demands crisp white handkerchiefs, which he insists she boil on top of the stove in the same way his mother does.

He makes her dial if he wants to phone.

The top of his egg must be sliced by a knife so that no bits of shell are broken.

In the meantime the kids will stay with Maddy, a friend and sympathizer from the centre, who sometimes helps out as a stop-gap measure for women with temporary problems. The best thing about Maddy is that she’s unlikely to be traced: she is not a battered wife. Madeleine Kelly is a middle-aged woman of independent means who lives in a cottage in Caldy, the posh side of the river. Kirsty met her just once at the centre, and once was all it had taken for her to feel reassured. If only she’d had a mother like Maddy, a large, round Mrs Apple with a body all soft and folded, who could have come straight from a nursery rhyme. She searched her face most carefully. There was gaiety and relaxation about her, and her laugh was wholesome and catching. She has fostered difficult kids all her life and lives in a homely muddle under thatch, her garden has a stream running through it and she keeps three gentle old dogs. She would be overjoyed to have Jake and Gemma until the end of September and wouldn’t hear of accepting any money. They will not attend school through the summer, but Maddy will teach them herself, give them love, toffee apples, cake mix and cuddles. Kirsty is not to worry. Maddy is merely a phone call away; she will write at least twice a week, and at the first sign of the slightest trouble she will let Kirsty know. Trevor will not pose a problem. No leads will take him to Maddy. But four months is so long.

‘Four months can be a very long time in the life of a child, Lord knows,’ Maddy agreed, nodding so her two chins met. ‘But not in my home,’ she purred. ‘Not with my old dogs, bless ’em. Not with my ducks and my chickens. You go on, my poor Kirsty. I know it’s hard, but you’re doing the right thing. Their four months with me will be one long, happy holiday. Now don’t your kids deserve that much after all they’ve been through?’

And Kirsty, only dimly aware that there was a world like this with such people in it, burst into tears.

He wears the spiky crucifix he was given at his First Holy Communion. Sometimes the silver chain causes a rash on the back of his neck.

Kirsty had expected to feel triumphant by now, so what is this sense of anticlimax? The suitcase rumbles around in the bus. She steadies it with a sweating hand which she wipes on her rain-soaked jacket. Is that his walk? She presses her face against the glass when, with sudden terror, she thinks she sees him hurrying along because of the rain. No, no, it can’t have been him. By now he will be at home in the dry, ringing his mother to ask if she’s there. Hah. Why would she go there? She had gone there once in the early days, hoping for sanctuary, sympathy, advice and understanding. After all, Edna had given birth to eight children; she should have some answers worth hearing. Had she known that her son was an animal? Was his condition genetic? Kirsty would have liked to ask Edna something about her own married life. She didn’t get the chance. She had struggled to Edna’s with a broken arm and a push chair and a child with mumps. Some hope of help from a woman with ‘I beheld Satan like lightning fall from Heaven,’ embroidered on a plaque on the wall. Beside her small coal fire, in a house that smelled of Sundays and sprouts, Edna raised her head and closed her eyes tight. ‘There is nothing more pleasing to God than suffering bravely borne,’ she had said in a voice divinely inspired. Then she rang for the ambulance. The following Christmas she gave Kirsty the text that assured her Jesus would carry her.

Kirsty didn’t want the doctor to know. He must have suspected something, of course, with all those hospital visits—accident prone, she laughed it off. She dreaded the kids being on some register, social workers nosing about and the threat of having them taken away. She was a bad and ineffective mother because she allowed herself to be abused, and Jake and Gemma saw the violence. They felt the violence, they ate, drank and slept the violence, although Trev never touched them—not yet—although there were threats. She kept them out of the house as long as she could at weekends in the park, by the river. On weekdays they went to bed early.

And there was nobody else to help her. When Kirsty first craved tea and sympathy she found this fact quite astonishing. How had this happened, her gradual and almost unnoticed alienation from the world? Since her marriage and the children she’d had little time to keep up with friends, and Trev was so disapproving, so rude to the few that were left, that it was easier not to bother. In some appalling and inexplicable way there was a comfortable justification in bowing down and submitting to him. After all, he loved her. He never meant to hurt her, to wrong her. He said he hated his own blind fury. Slowly but surely the Christmas-card list grew shorter and petered out, save for Trev’s scattered relations. Kirsty has no family to speak of—just a brother somewhere in Australia, and he hasn’t written in years, not since he married. She doesn’t even know Ralph’s address any more. They were both brought up by their father, who died the year after her marriage. The girls at the store have their own dramas and Kirsty has never mixed much with them, Trev’s demands being so heavy, his jealousy and distrust so shaming. Because of the loss of her friends, Kirsty realized with a sudden and vast kind of loneliness, she hasn’t laughed properly in years.

And all in the name of love.

‘Nothing’s ever fun with you,’ Trevor said, ‘miserable slut. Forever whining.’

‘Laugh, laugh,’ he would goad her, ‘laugh for God’s sake. Stop your bloody lamenting.’

But sometimes she wondered if he was gay, in spite of his loud masculinity, or whether he hated women, because of the things he did to her, and with such ugly ferocity.

Kirsty sits on the station concourse, nervously sipping an overstewed coffee, her eyes glued to the noticeboard, her ears straining to catch the announcements. She will board her train the minute it’s in. The ticket in her hand is something to treasure, a jewel that took eight years to possess and which is more priceless than a Pharaoh’s gold.

T
HERE IS STILL A
long way to go. Heart pounding, half shambling, Kirsty eventually finds her booked seat and collapses into it, closing her eyes. Then, in panic, she covers her face with her book in case Trev might be raging up and down the platform, peering into the carriages through hooded, angry eyes. There are two spotty guys across the table and a girl with wild black hair sitting next to her; she took this in before she collapsed but not much else about them. Maybe they are going to the Burleston—a block booking, who knows? And that large girl across the aisle; she looks nervous and untravelled. As the train pulls out of Lime Street Station, Kirsty very slowly brings her eyes out of hiding, raises them shyly from her book, over the top of the smell of damp clothes.

She gives such a sigh of relief when the platform slips past without sight or sound of a rampaging Trevor that she fears everyone must have heard, including the girl across the way. Kirsty gives her a sideways glance. Poor thing. Kirsty might be nervous, but if so she’s not alone. The timid-looking girl sitting opposite is far from happy with her surroundings and her distress reaches Kirsty across the airwaves like the tinny sounds of somebody’s Walkman. Kirsty’s focus dwindles uncomfortably to the three tipsy sailors who share the girl’s table.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

A non-smoking carriage, of course, Kirsty muses, summing up the girl. This girl, identified by the labels on her luggage left in the recess next to the door, would not appreciate smoke attaching itself to that cheap new suit. Is that the first suit she has ever had? The first time she has ever left home? Indeed, the first long journey she has ever made without her family, except with the Guides to the Lake District when she was about twelve years old?