Veil of Darkness (4 page)

‘Whaccha bleedin’ problem, love?’ It’s a crackling, drunken sarcasm. His face is shiny and innocent. Putrid, he makes her feel sick.

The smile is stuck to Avril’s face as she murmurs. ‘I’m sorry? I wasn’t aware that I had a problem.’ Oh God, she sounds like a prig, her voice like a hum in the back of her throat.

But discretion is the better part of valour.

The man pretends to look surprised. ‘Ey up? So why doncha want to drink with us? Too fuckin’ uppity, yeah?’ And he nudges his grinning companion.

The passengers sitting within hearing distance, uneasy now, afraid of unseemly involvement, concentrate squeamishly on their books, and one man opens his lap-top computer and starts a desperate tapping. The young woman who has been staring turns quickly away and stares out through the window. All of them settling, safe as they can, to watch the ensuing humiliation.

What shall we do with the drunken sailor…

Silent up until now, the beery sailor sitting in the window seat next to Avril puts one arm around her headrest so it’s not quite touching her but almost. Out of the corner of her eye she can see sweat beads on his brow and there’s dried froth on his upper lip where he hasn’t licked it clean. Ugh! Revolting. Every sinew in her body urges her to get up and move, to stand in the corridor, if necessary, for the rest of the journey rather than submit to this. But how can Avril do this now without asking for more trouble? Is this partly her fault, because she looks like a tart? She had slapped some make-up on in the toilet after the train left the station, after she’d waved goodbye to Mother. Just a dab. A natural beige with a blusher and lipstick of matching pink from the Body Shop. She was sure she hadn’t overdone it. Oh, dear God, let them stop. Please, please, make them stop, and her heart beats uncontrollably.

‘Tell you what,’ grunts the ringleader, leaning across the table with unfocused eyes, eyes that are opaque and dull, neither hostile nor unkind, but so close that his sour breath touches her and she sees bits of ham roll on his teeth. ‘Tell you what, gel, why don’t you and me get to know each other while we’re stuck here bored as two fuckin’ farts…’ and she feels him stretching out his leg so it’s firmly stuck between her legs.

‘Good, innit? Eh?’

Everyone can perceive her shame. Avril goes rigid, like a small animal caught in a trap, the kind of animal that might pull off its leg in order to break free. ‘Shit,’ slurs her antagonist, as he knocks over his can with his sleeve and the lager dregs drip over the edge of the table on her side.

Should Kirsty help? She knows that she should. But she is so frightened of men. This is awful.
Just awful.

Out of the blue.

‘Why don’t you just sod off, you sad, pathetic dickheads!’ Startled, Avril and Kirsty look up as the girl in jeans beside the window scrapes her belongings into a bag which displays a Burleston sticker, climbs over Kirsty’s knee, half on, half off the table, and stands aggressively in the aisle, hands on hips.

Whooping with derision, the sailor withdraws his knee, happy to concentrate instead on this new source of torment, a much more fiery and worthwhile subject. Next to the aisle, he staggers up, but before he can gain his balance the newcomer pushes him hard on the chest and he falls back drunkenly, gaping.

‘Come on, pet,’ says the confident beauty to Avril, ‘get your things and come and sit somewhere away from these animals. I need a bloody fag anyway.’

‘But m-my cases…’ stutters Avril, struggling to her feet, tugging at her skirt.

‘Sod your cases, they’ll be OK.’

And because her saviour is disappearing Avril is forced to rush to catch up, still holding tears at bay, clutching her handbag, her book and a carrier bag containing a heavy thermos. She can hear lewd cheering coming from the defeated sailors behind her as she clumps fatly down the corridor, following the long-haired girl with the droopy bag and the earrings.

And Kirsty, assuming she is the natural choice for alternative, handy victim, picks up her bags and follows. But her left leg has gone numb with the tension and she has to hang on to every other seat.

O
N THEIR STUMBLING WAY
to carriage B, neither Avril Stott nor her saviour Bernadette Kavanagh notice the drab-looking woman who gets up to follow them down the train. She could be an imprint on the seat of someone who sat there journeys ago. Avril is too nervous, too traumatized by her recent ordeal to see anything but her own flaming cheeks, while Bernadette yearns only for a fag. When will this wretched journey end?

This is fine for Kirsty. Kirsty would rather not be noticed. She is a watcher from safe places. But after she has taken a seat, a spare seat opposite the others in the yellowy, acrid atmosphere of the smoker’s carriage, she stares at the rescuer with a mixture of envy and guilt.

‘I’m Avril.’

‘I’m Bernadette.’

Avril sees Bernadette’s sticker. ‘You’re going to the Burleston, like me.’

They do not shake hands like men would.

And Kirsty, pulsing softly and secretly, does not reveal herself.

Avril is besotted.

Bernadette is a beautiful gypsy, a pure, untrammelled thing, wandering free, knowing nothing of cares or woes. Messy, but lovely in the uncaring, pure cotton-and-silk kind of way that shouts out style and confidence, quite the opposite to Avril’s mother’s ideas of neat-and-tidy jersey and man-made mixtures which always smell as if they’ve already been worn by women not quite in control of their hygiene. Rather similar to charity shops, as soon as you go through the door of Avril’s mother’s favourite boutiques you get that flour-and-water-pastey whiff of the unwashed elderly.

Bernadette isn’t slightly bothered about her new companions, but concentrates instead on the quiz she is doing in her shiny magazine. With the pen top in her mouth, sometimes replaced by her smouldering fag, she demands of the rescued Avril, ‘What would you do if you saw your best friend’s bloke smooching somebody else? (a) tell her, (b) have a stern word with him, (c) beat up the other chick with your handbag, or (d) feel secretly pleased and do nothing?’

‘I would tell her,’ answers Avril, pleased to be asked, ‘of course.’

‘She wouldn’t thank you for it.’ Bernadette’s green, cat’s eyes narrow over a trail of smoke before going back, engrossed, to her work.

Avril, partly because of her sweet nature and partly because of her upbringing, feels it’s rude to keep silent, particularly when she owes so much. ‘Is this your first hotel job?’ She is well aware of her boring question and Kirsty winces on her behalf.

‘Yep,’ says Bernadette, trying hard to be sociable, but far too unhappy to succeed. ‘Never heard of the place before. Just took it as a desperate measure to stop myself going insane.’

‘It’s my first time, too,’ says Avril, making it sound like sex.

‘Got to make some money somehow,’ says Bernadette shrugging.

At Plymouth they watch Avril’s three sailors lurch loudly along the platform, being side-stepped by fellow passengers with disgust all over their faces. ‘Thank goodness they’ve gone,’ says Avril, keen, once again, to break the silence which she thinks of as uncomfortable and a failure on her part to be interesting.

‘They don’t mean any harm really,’ says Bernadette in the Irish accent that makes her voice as alluring as the rest of her. It’s so unfair. Bernadette’s got everything while Avril… ‘They’re just rat-arsed, that’s all.’

‘I dare say you’re right,’ says Avril.

Misreading Bernadette’s attempts at sisterly reassurance, Avril’s inadequacy surfaces again. Bernadette considers her inadequate, unable to deal with a trio of sailors who were only having some laddish fun. Avril would go deeper into herself at this, except that she can’t because of her stiff and uncomfortable jacket.

After being warned by a muffled male voice that the buffet is now closing, they rattle on to Penzance, Bernadette, half waking, half sleeping, curled up in the corner with her richly embroidered material holdall and half its contents—tatty old make-up and screwed-up tissues—spewed out over the table. Kirsty, wide awake, keeps silent and watches.

Ah. Poor Bernadette.

Bernadette doesn’t care any more. She just doesn’t care. She can’t try any harder. Nothing she does seems to be working. She unburdens herself on Avril, describing her dire situation, safe in the knowledge that her audience is captive, half by speed and half by good manners. Smoke swirls wildly over her crazy confidences. ‘They warned me that if I didn’t pull myself out of this depression soon, leave Merseyside for good and get myself some sort of future, I would end up a druggie stuck in some squat, and all because of Dominic Coates.’

‘How awful, how awful. Poor you,’ says Avril, seeing that her heroine is distraught.

There is no opportunity to invent Bernadette. So Kirsty listens instead. This isn’t difficult. The whole carriage could hear if it wanted.

‘Slime bag,’ says Bernadette.

‘He must be,’ says the obedient Avril.

‘Bullshitter,’ says Bernie more savagely.

She leans forward earnestly, as if Avril has some handy balm she might apply if convinced of the need. She is a demented patient begging her doctor for Prozac. Bernadette had a good job working as a waitress at the Old Orleans. HE had come in with a crowd of students. HE had chatted her up. She was used to that, she never had trouble finding fellas, but, God help her, after his third or fourth visit she had begun to see him as ‘different’. Hah! Laugh? She could cry. They were engaged within a month.

Kirsty sighs knowingly. OK. Bernadette might see the girl opposite with the huge diddies and sum her up as a poor little eejit, but when it comes down to the hard facts of life, Bernadette, with all her blarney, turns out to be as fragile as everyone else.

Bernadette paints dramatic pictures of how she came to her present plight. Her audience listens, transfixed, as her voice drones on piteously, seeking some kind of instant relief, as if sharing the pain might lessen it.

Dominic Coates was rich, well-spoken and bright.

Bernadette Kavanagh was poor, an Irish navvy’s daughter and a money-grabbing slut.

That’s what his toffee-nosed parents thought anyway. Jesus, one day she’ll show them, for she has never known such pain. She loved being seen around with him and his crowd. How she would enjoy making good in
A Woman of Substance
style, run some multi-national concern, live in New York and return to their house and moon at all of them. She would cultivate that snooty look she had seen on Dominic’s daddy’s face until she got it off pat, as if something nasty was under his long, hairy-nostrilled, aristocratic nose. And his mammy, with that scoff behind her lips. In her dreams Bernadette drives to their house in a top-of-the-range Porsche convertible. She snaps up their businesses furtively, one by one, without them knowing who is responsible, until she squeezes them out with nothing.

Avril, out of her depth and embarrassed, tries hard to sympathize while finding this candour crude and shameful. Kirsty, hiding behind her Mills and Boon, carefully stays separate.

‘Am I mad?’ Bernadette asks Avril.

‘No, of course not,’ and Avril gives a tactful smile.

Bernadette admits she’s ashamed of her thoughts. Sweet Jesus, will you listen to her now. She is surely a soul in torment. She wants to maim him, really hurt him, she loves him so much. She adored him. She would have been happy to be his Timberland Filofax, something he valued, was dependent upon and took round with him wherever he went. But while she still harbours these furious thoughts she is just as vulnerable as she’s ever been. It’s uncanny how love is so easily replaced by hatred. Both are burning strong. Bernadette must strive for the point when she stops thinking about him completely, the point of detachment when the name Dominic means no more than Daz or Mother’s Pride.

‘Ah well. Here we are at Penzance.’ She scoops her belongings back into her bag, as though picking up all the pain and stuffing it back inside her.

The tired little party for the Burleston Hotel gather at the station exit, eight of them in all off this one train. They smile nervously at one another and check their various bags are in sight, and then along comes a smart minibus with the name of the hotel printed tastefully on the side. Avril squeezes in beside Bernadette; they have shared a carriage for the last three hours, Bernadette has opened her heart, and Avril, who has never made many, believes they are now firm friends.

‘So what’s your name?’ she politely asks Kirsty, recognizing for the first time the woman who stared at her on the train. She seems amazed to find her here, to discover they both had the same destination, as if it’s some secret they share. Hey, it’s not so amazing. The flotsam and jetsam of life.

Bernadette has sunk into silence, trying to discourage her companion’s chatter and Kirsty can sympathize with this. It must be a shock for Bernadette, who had bared her soul in carriage B, to discover that her sweet-faced confessor is now demanding something in return. Mates. When they have nothing in common. Avril is desperately seeking a friend, like you do, so you don’t have to go in alone, while Bernadette is not here for small talk: she’s here to stop herself losing her mind and she doesn’t want anyone clinging or thinking they can rely on her. If Avril thinks Bernadette kind, she is wrong; she is not kind, has no time to be kind, no time to soften towards anyone else or be considerate of their feelings. She has let too many people down to allow herself to do it again.

The two spotty boys must be would-be-waiters, although they don’t look old enough and are certainly incapable of carrying a blazing tureen with style. Perhaps they are doomed to the kitchens. The two young teenage girls in the party are probably part of the chambermaid crew—changing sheets and sprucing up bathrooms, picking strangers’ pubic hairs out of plug holes and off toilet seats. At least Bernadette got a job as a barmaid because of her past experience. She would loathe to clean up after the privileged, especially after what she’d been through. Dominic’s folks considered her scum. She can well imagine that snooty family hotelling it and shitting on anyone more lowly than themselves.