“I don’t know what on earth’s going on here,” Helen said into the phone. “But I’ve locked the place and I’m not going back in there again until I have back-up. I can call in and get a patrol team, but honestly, I’d rather you were here. We’re both in this.”
“All right,” David said, his voice tiny and fragmenting. He was obviously in his car, a fact she already knew, for his voice kept dissolving into hisses of static. Bursts of crackling interference split his sentences into senseless islands of words. “I should be there in.....an hour.”
“Say again?”
“Wait... half an hour.....through traffic.” She got the message. There was one final burst of electronic heavy breathing and the phone went dead. He was on his way, just passing the centre of town. He’d come down the motorway and across the bridge that spanned the river near Barloan Harbour. She felt a warm glow of more than just relief.
Down in the kitchen, Nina Galt was trying to remember exactly what the girl had said. Helen was on her third cup of tea of the afternoon and the pressure was getting to her, but she was reluctant to move. The toilets were beyond the stairway which led up to the room where Ginny Marsden had spent the night and had now, somehow contaminated with the foul, disabling smell.
“She looked more than twenty two to me,” Nina Galt was saying. “She must have had a bloody hard life. If I’d looked like that when I was her age I’d have put my head in the oven. I thought she was at least thirty something, maybe even older than that. I remember thinking she was pushing it to have a kid, know what I mean?. There was grey in her hair and it looked like she could use a good shampoo. You could see places where it had fallen out. Has she got aids or something?”
“She’s pretty sick,” Helen conceded. Once they’d come downstairs, Nina Galt seemed to forget the fact that she was a policeman and any hostility she might have initially harboured melted like spring frost on a south wall. She had seen the look of unaccountable fear on the younger woman’s face and some of it had transmitted itself to her. They were now two women sitting in a big kitchen, drinking tea, and trying not to be afraid. What she should fear, Nina had no idea, but when she’d got to the room upstairs, she had felt the unaccountable shiver of panic. She had been downright scared, for no reason, and that was scary enough. Helen Lamont, for all she was young and slightly built and good-looking, she looked tough and capable, had to be, going by the way she had faced Nina down in the front of the hostel, and if she was scared then there was something to worry about.
“What about the baby?”
“We don’t know. She may have kidnapped it.”
“She never did,” Nina said, more of a question than a statement. “She didn’t look like somebody who’d do that. A good breath of wind would have knocked her down.”
Helen had brought in the register from the front counter and had it opened on the table. Ginny Marsden, confirmed from the photograph, though Nina Galt claimed she looked at least ten years older, had given her friend’s name and shown a bank card as identification. Nina confirmed, yet again, that she didn’t have a pram when she arrived, but had brought one back later in the afternoon, leaving it in the space behind the stairs in the hallway.
“And nobody saw her leave?”
Nina shrugged, blowing a dragons breath double plume of smoke down her nostrils. “They come and go. We give them a roof and a kettle and hotplate, a bed and somewhere to put their clothes. It’s a charity, a kind of halfway house, just a shelter out of the cold.. The social services take them in after that, some of the time anyway, and sometimes the council might find them a permanent place, if they’re really lucky, for this council’s been broke for years, run by loonies and gladhanders. As I say, they come and go. It looks pretty much like she’s gone.”
She drew in another heavy drag of smoke, held it for a while, her eyes fixed on Helen. She let it go and spoke through the smoke. “I home she doesn’t come back. Whatever she’s got, I don’t want to catch. And I’ll have to get that room fumigated too.”
David Harper arrived twenty minutes after the telephone call and Helen knew he must have broken the law to get there so quickly. She felt a glow suffuse her at the thought of his concern.
“Plenty to tell you,” he said. “How did you find her?”
“Solid police work while you were running around chasing your tail. And I haven’t found her. I’ve only found where she’s been. She’s gone.”
“Great,” David said, brows drawn down. “You could have told me on the phone and it would have saved a trip.”
Helen’s glow vanished. She bristled. “Don’t come the smartass David. You should have been here and you’d be telling a different story.”
She stoppedherself, realising it was the very concern that had spurred that response. “Sorry. Anyway, she’s on foot, with a baby,” she waited for his eyes to register that, “and a pram. She won’t be far, and it doesn’t look as if it’s in danger, but the girl herself could be. Mrs Galt says she’s sick.”
“Call me Nina,” the big, not quite natural blonde insisted, favouring David with a wide and predatory smile. She looked as if she could swallow him. For some reason, it annoyed Helen. Nina went through the story again and then they went back upstairs, Helen trailing cautiously behind David, noting this time how Nina wiggled her broad but shapely backside in an almost comic come-on. The door opened and Nina stood back to let them both inside and immediately Helen felt her heartbeat speed up.
“Same smell as the McDougall place, and Barker’s house.” David noted. “But a lot fainter.”
“What is it?” Nina wanted to know. “Should I get the health inspector in and have the place fumigated? Is it some kind of disease?”
“Don’t think so,” David told her. “A good scrub with soap wouldn’t do any harm.” He was looking around, noting the rumpled carpet still snagged under the leg of the old bed and the swirl of blankets on the mattress, like the nest he’d seen in the McDougall house. Like the one he’d seen at Celia Barker’s place after Helen had stumbled out. Round the back of the hostel, the dog was still barking, though the sounds were weaker, more muted. Every now and again, the clatter of its charge against the door, and the sound of wood tearing would rattle the ancient sash window in its frame.
“Somebody should put that beast out of its misery,” David said.
Over on the work surface beside the sink, David picked up the polystyrene package which still contained a shallow, dilute pool of blood. It bore the name of the butcher’s shop on a stick-on label. Nina told him the shop was less than a hundred yards away. An empty eggbox lay close by, with twin trickles of hardening albumen glued to the wooden surface of the well-used breadboard.
The scent was almost gone, though Helen’s nose was still wrinkled in disgust. When he had walked into the room, David had experienced a flutter, a sudden thumping double beat of his heart and an odd, burning sensation in his temples which spread to his ears and he recognised it as his angry mode, a mood-marker that had been part of him since childhood. His father had always teased him about it, telling him to go cool his ears whenever the younger David had lost his temper in frustration. It was nowhere near as bad as the twist of violent emotions that had shunted through him in the house he’d thought of as Thelma Quigley’s, but it was similar enough to make him realise that Helen had been right to call him. There was indeed a connection, a very bizarre connection, between the flat and rotten - and if he admitted it, strangely exciting - smell and the two women, one dead, one still missing for now. The baby was the other connection.
For an instant, a thought tried to grab his attention, danced away, then came back. He snatched it. Was the smell something to do with the baby Ginny Marsden had scooped from the pram? Was it sick?
Was it dead? That was something to consider, a possibility, however remote. David made a quick and professional search of the room, realised there was nothing more to be learned, and went out.
The big and typically beefy butcher told them that a girl had bought more than a pound of ox-liver and some eggs. He couldn’t recall exactly when, but he recalled she looked stooped and cold. “I remember thinking the liver should do her some good,” he said. “Plenty of iron and vitamins. Put some meat on the bones. A good steak would have done her some good.”
Of Ginny Marsden, however, there was no sign. Nobody else had seen the girl with the pram with the one squeaky wheel, with the exception of the assistant in the charity shop who had sold it to her, and she couldn’t remember what the girl had looked like, even with encouragement.
It was only after speaking to the butcher that David’s thought came back to him, that the baby might somehow, however improbably, be dead. But when he voiced it, Helen countered the notion. Old Maggie in the cafe down by the bus stop at the far end of River Street had told her the infant had turned and looked at her with big blue eyes.
“She said it made a noise, and it smelled like a new baby. Smell of milk. They’re all like that, I can tell you. Every weekend my mother’s house is full of them. They smell of worse than milk, I can tell you.”
“Not your scene?”
“Believe it,” Helen assured him. “I’m the black sheep of the family ’cause I haven’t gone into mass reproduction yet. My sisters give me pitying looks, but it’s not me that’s stuck with changing nappies and getting up in the middle of the night to pace the floor with teething babies. It doesn’t look like fun to me.”
David smiled at the idea of Helen pacing the floor, but at the same time he recalled June’s ever more frequent complaints that time was moving on; that her biological clock was ticking off the days.
“Oh, probably sometime I might go for it.” Helen said. “When I meet the right guy. And after I reach chief inspector level. My mother doesn’t believe women should have a career. She thinks we should populate the earth, but as far as I’m concerned, the earth is doing very nicely without my help. Anyway, I haven’t met the right guy yet.”
She looked up at him and they both smiled.
He had sensed the other one.
Immediately a tingle of strange and fearsome excitement had washed through him. It brought a hunger, the new and different need, a hollow yearning that was hot and fierce and infinitely powerful.
Already he was spent, tired and drained from the effort of subduing the mother and bringing her back under control after the terror of abandonment. He had made her feed herself and he had fed off her, draining her of the building blocks his own changing body needed and then he’d slept and she’d tried to leave. The anger bubbled inside of him, anger and fear and the realisation of his own vulnerability.
That was another new thing that he had learned since the moment the old mother had stopped and failed. He had discovered a fear, something that he might have known long ago but had forgotten in the years of complacent feeding. Fear.
There had always been a mother, back, back as far as his strange, wordless memory would allow him to look, all their bovine bland faces merging into one, all of their teats melded into one great feeding. When one was finished, another would come to take her place, without fail, without question.
And now there was this one, who had fought against him as he drained her.
Inside her, he could perceive the destruction and dissolution, and instinctively knew she would not last. His hunger quickened at that. He would need more, much more as the change burgeoned. Already, he could feel his limbs lengthen, his muscles strengthen, and there was an even deeper hunger than the one he was used to, now awakening from dormancy within him.
The change was racing towards him and it scared him as much as it excited. It was new and unknown, the first real new thing in his life for as long as his memory could ascertain. He could not remember his beginning.
But he remembered the other one, the new female, with that tingle, unexpected and strange, the stirring of his growing want. The fearsome excitement had ripped inside him in a tide of sudden ferment. It was mixed with the fear and the inexplicable sense of vulnerability.
She was threat.
Yet she was more, though he did not have the words or the thoughts to explain what or why.
He had made the mother move, after a while, when he had fought to dominate her and get his will inside her thoughts, damping down the fires of rebellion, stamping on the sparks until there was little left but a residual heat and some distant, bubbling flares that were far enough away to cause no concern. He had expended himself in that huge burst of energy and passion, draining his glands of everything they had, using up his vital growing sustenance in the singular effort of concentration that harnessed her. He was drained and had to rest, but even then, while he made her move, he could not let the link between them subside.
There was danger here now, he sensed. Outside, the animal screeched and howled as it battered and snarled for freedom, its mind crazed by the mental shriek that had almost turned its brain to slush. As soon as he had the mother, as soon as he could make her move, he needed to be out of that place, where it had seemed, his next change would happen. She moved slowly and he could feel the vibration of the grinding bones and feel the heat of the inflammation in her joints as all of her goodness was leeched out to make his frame strong for the next stage.
She had carried him down the stairs, wrapped in the shawl, much as she had wrapped and trapped him in the blanket, but he sensed no danger now. He made her put him in the carrier, in the dark. In another room, another of them, an old, spent and used one, was singing low. He stretched a curious tendril of thought to touch this one and picked up her dry fruitlessness, the emptiness of her body. There was no feeding there.
Outside he closed his eyes against the light, however dim, that managed to get between the storm cover and the hood, turning his head to bury his face against the cloth, all the time holding her with a loop of his own thoughts, a rein of attention and compulsion. The pram rattled and jounced on the flagstones. She walked on in the narrowness of the street where there was no direct sun, just moving.
Then he touched the other one.
His outreach trailed across her and a sudden panic flared inside him,. The mother stopped dead in her tacks. Another one, again old and dry, muttered something in the passing, annoyed at having been held up by the sudden stoppage. The different one, the one he had touched before was very near, so close her presence was like an itch on the surface of his skin. His attention wavered out in an expanding circle of apprehension, ready to draw back at the first real hint of danger.
He touched her again and felt her response. She was turning towards him, her mind already open. She was moving, quite slowly, moving in the other direction. She was turning, very quickly, swivelling towards him and he stroked the different part of her mind, that rare part in one of these creatures, that could perceive. It was weak and unused, but inside it the potential was vast. As soon as he felt it, he withdrew very quickly in great alarm. She too could reach.
She was swivelling, and the crevasse in her mind was beginning to open, triggered by, responding to, his initial alien invasion. He knew she could feel his touch.
Go Go Go Go NOW.
The mother turned, swivelled the carrier, back up the alley. He drew back, pulled back. Let go. He broke the contact with a psychic snap that was almost a pain.
Mentally, for some reason, he was cringing away from her, stretched between the horns of his own hungers, confused by the seismic heavings inside his head and his body. He felt the glands puff up, draining his own substance, and he had to concentrate to force them back to quiescence. The tingle, fierce and unexpectedly violent, shuddered under his skin. He experienced a new hunger and a savage gladness that mixed in with the fear of entrapment and the uncertainty of the hunted.
She was hunting him, he could feel that. She did not know what he was. Was unsure of his very existence, on the conscious level, but already she had breathed him in and the chasm inside of her own mind, the crevasse that held the coiled power, had sensed the strangeness, the difference of him.
She did not know it, but they had already met, already touched.
She had savoured him.
He forced the mother to move away, to keep walking. The wheel squeaked and the mother’s bones ground together, the sound of uncontrolled erosion. He made her move, put as much distance as possible between him and the other one. That was all he could do for now, get away, make a retreat. If she was hunting for him, she would find him, maybe, but by that time, he might be prepared; he might be able to do something about it.
For the time being, all he wanted was the quiet and solitude he instinctively knew was needed for the change. Despite that, as the mother took him further from the touch of the other one, the strange, unique excitement shuddered through him.
Barloan Harbour’s small railway station looked like the centrepiece of a Victorian Christmas card under the light fall of snow which sent flakes floating silently to earth beneath a sky that was mysteriously clear to the east. Overhead the moon, low in the early evening winter sky, was round and bright, ringed with a soft and fuzzy halo, a bomber’s moon they used to say in the old days. It picked out the sluggish waters of the harbour basin, now at half tide and on the rise. The scattering of snow lined the stone slope down to a few feet above the waterline where a few hardy gulls and oystercatchers bleated hollowly. The moonlight limned the rail tracks which led east to the city, or back west to Levenford where Ginny Marsden had laboriously pushed the pram, still squeaking, up the ramp and onto the first train to pull in, heading eastwards. Something urged her to get off here at the harbour station, in the shadow of the soaring bridge which crossed the broad tidal river in an elegant double curve.
It had been difficult to get the pram off when the automatic doors had opened. A boy, maybe a student, had taken the heavy end, hardly looking at her as he did so, and eased it onto the platform.
“There you are, missus,” he said, courteous and friendly, hefting his full shoulder bag and sauntering away into the gathering dark. Five days ago, he’d have given her the eye, taken in her long and elegant legs, maybe even sat next to her on the train as soon as he spotted her tumble of blonde hair. Now he only saw a woman with a pram, hardly giving her a glance. Ginny Marsden was hardly even aware of that. There were other matters demanding her close attention.
She slowly shoved herself and the pram towards the small, old fashioned waiting room, which, as luck would have it, if luck has anything to do with this story, was the only one in the whole line, from Kirkland right up to Central High, to have a coal fire, and that was only because the stationmaster, who lived in a small brick house just beyond the edge of the platform, could get as much coal as he could from the scuttle boats that stopped to unload at the far end of the harbour.
A couple of schoolkids stopped canoodling when she slowly pushed the door open and trundled the old pram ahead of her. She hardly noticed them but, now disturbed in their private place, they pursed their lips, exhaling in suffering sighs, and went out to find another private neuk to resume their closer acquaintance. Ginny walked slowly towards the flicker of the fire, spent a few moments effortfully turning the pram so that it was broadside to the heat and then sat down, trying to ignore the grind of dreadful pain in her hips and knees. Her fingers were red from the cold in Levenford’s elevated station where the wind had been gentle but insistent and frigid. She had no gloves and she’d had no mind of her own, at that time, to tell her to put her hands in her pockets. They had stayed motionless, clenched tight to the handle of the pram. Now in the warmth of the waiting room, they were red raw and scadded, each knuckle swollen to twice its normal width. When the blood began to run again into the shrunken veins, the pain in her hands corkscrewed deep under the skin and she was aware of it constantly, without reprieve. She could do nothing about it. She could not, at this time, even weep.
Outside, beyond the dusty window, an occasional flash of bright blue light would jitter and sizzle on the overhead electric line where the hard frost allowed a trickle of power to escape. It was an eerie lightning, a hissing spark that sounded like the shivering, wordless hiss of the commands inside her head. Moving with infinite care, like an old, spent woman, she sat at the end of the slatted bench, feeling the heat on the side of her bare leg. Her head ached and her breasts ached and in her womb, blood trickled thickly, radiating the constant cramp, but these sensations were almost pleasant in comparison to the awful tides of hurt that juddered into her bones.
She sat there, passing the time in a daze that allowed for hardly any thought. The baby still had her battened down, its pressure still hissing inside her head, its manipulation almost absolute.
After a while a train went past, clattering over the cold-widened gaps and making the waiting room shudder. Once past, in the darkness under the soaring arch of the bridge, it howled like a beast and was gone. The baby jerked in the pram, its attention momentarily grabbed by the noise and vibration. The brief escape from the pressure of its will let Ginny’s consciousness bubble up to the surface.
“Please God,” she prayed silently. “Please god spare me from this.”
Out in the night, the train’s clatter diminished and the blue sparkle jittered again on the overhead cables.
“I’m dying,” Ginny Marsden realised, but there was nothing she could do about that. She was too tired to move, to hurt and too desperately weak to do anything but bear the pain. In the momentary respite from its attention a tear welled up in her eye, making the already dim shapes in the sparse room waver and dance. It spilled out and trickled down her cheek, a brief, transient warmth on the dry and wrinkling skin of her face. It slid past the corner of her mouth where the surface was fissured and puckered into creases that aged the young girl so violently that the student on the train had taken her for middle aged.
The single tear trickled to her chin, hung there for a moment, then dropped to the matte of her coat. It was a tear of utter despair. It was all she could do.
The sound of the train disappeared into the far distance, a rhythmic rattle that faded to a whisper. High overhead, on the road bridge, the lights of cars and trucks speared out across the curve and into the black gulf of the night, picking out the motes of snow suspended in the air.
The baby’s attention turned back to Ginny Marsden.
She felt its probe, its rough and feral touch and her own mind flinched away from the contact, quite fruitlessly. It did not even have to waste its energy and substance by spraying its chemical messengers now. If she had looked inside, under the hood, she would have seen, not a baby, but a blurred shape whose outlines twisted and changed, now dark, now light, now smooth, now dry and flaking. It would have been baby sized, but thin-limbed and belly-bloated.
Yet when it demanded to be fed, she would feed it. When it demanded to be held, she would hold it. When it wanted mothering, she would mother it.
Later, another train, this one heading west, went thundering past, not stopping at Barloan Harbour. Ginny stirred and with enormous effort, she stood up. There was no-one else in the waiting room, but had there been, he would have heard the awful millstone sound of bone grinding on bone. Ginny Marsden paused for breath, unable to let out a cry, even a moan. Her feet moved, and she went out and along the narrow platform to the white gate that led to the cobbles of the narrow sloping road. She pushed the pram ahead of her up the hill just as a small girl on a big boy’s bike came flying down, pigtails flying in the slipstream.
“Watch out Kirsty,” another girl called, swooping down the hill on a smaller bicycle. “You nearly hit that woman.” The pigtailed girl wobbled, turned her head to watch the woman push the pram, her attention snagged by something. The bike’s momentum carried her beyond the stooped figure, away from whatever had attracted her notice and both children, carefree and excited, whizzed past, leaving Ginny Marsden alone on the road.
It took her half an hour to get to the main through road. By the time she reached the small end cottage with the bed-and-breakfast sign in its window, she was limping heavily and the nerves in her left foot were completely numb.
The old woman who answered the door wore glasses as thick as bottle ends, which made her eyes piggy and shrunken. While her vacancy sign was out in the garden, an old fashioned B&B plaque hanging from two chains on what looked like a hangman’s gibbet, she hadn’t expected any business so close to Christmas. She had two rooms on the top and one on the bottom and that was the one she offered the gaunt, ill-looking woman who stood at the door.
Mrs Cosgrove, a dumpy little woman with a wizened leg, a legacy from the old polio days before the war, told her the rate and said she always took cash, never trusting those plastic cards. Ginny fumbled, almost absently for her bag, searched it and said she would have to go to the bank the next day. Her voice was hollow and distant, as if she really was sick. The old woman looked her up and down suspiciously. There was a silence as she peered through those magnifying lenses, then, at that moment, the baby whimpered. Mrs Cosgrove looked for a second as if she’d been suddenly slapped. She blinked several times and without hesitation, she bustled the woman and the pram inside.
Ginny hardly said a word, merely nodding like an automaton, as the woman, as wide as she was tall, and her hair pulled into a savage bun, shoo-ed her into a ground floor room, lit a gas fire, and then brought the girl a steaming plate of soup and a mound of buttered bread.
She asked if the baby might need a bottle, explaining that she had one of her grandson’s still in the house. Ginny shook her head and bent to sup the hot soup.
For some reason, it tasted slimy and alien, almost made her sick, but she forced it down. She wanted something with blood and calcium, something raw and full of sustenance and powerfully rich. The tastebuds of her tongue seemed to stand out on their own when the strange appetite came upon her, but still, she supped the soup until it was gone.
The woman finally left her alone and after a while, the baby demanded to be fed.
Ginny Marsden, looking like a woman more that twice her age, now aware of the imminence of her own death, obeyed.
______
June rang the bell after ten, just as Helen was leaving. The three of them stood awkwardly in the hall, David, wrong-footed again, not sure whether to let Helen out first or invite June in. Finally June made the decision, pushing her way past and drawing Helen a look that should have pinned her to the wall.
“See you in the morning,” Helen said, giving him a wide smile which also conveyed her mirth at his discomfort. Quite archly, very mischievously, she added: “And don’t sleep in, Sergeant, we’ve a busy day ahead of us.” Before the door closed, she winked at him and turned away towards her car.
“What was she doing here,” June wanted to know.
“She was collecting some of the papers we’ve been working on.”
“Are you screwing her?”
“Jees....” David started to say. The question, so bluntly put, had startled him to bewilderment. He’d never heard her use that word before. “What do you mean?” he finally asked.
“I mean, are you screwing that bitch? Are you giving it to her? Huh? Like what you and me never seem to do these days?”
“Don’t be so bloody stupid,” he snorted, all the while sensing a hot and turgid flare of excitement at the now-conscious thought of it. He hadn’t actually considered the idea, not deliberately, he told himself and even then he knew that was not quite true. He had thought of her, even though he’d always tried to keep his working relationship separate.
He had pretended he hadn’t understood the previous night when Helen had told him he didn’t have to do a runner, letting him know by her very posture, that he was welcome to stay, at least a little longer. Maybe he had picked it up wrongly, though he didn’t think so. He recalled the powerful, unexpected surge of desire that he’d had to clamp down, not as powerful as the un-natural sensation in the dead woman’s house, but a powerful need within him just the same. They were partners, but now there was something else sparking between them that confused and wrong-footed him. He could have stayed at Helen’s, but he hadn’t, because he had made the effort, ever though on the way home, he’d swung between lust and loyalty, pinned between the physical drive and his own sense of fair play.
“Then what was she doing here?”
“I already told you.”
“You’re a bloody liar. You’ve been seeing her behind my back, haven’t you?”
She pushed past him, along the short, wide hallway where some of his best pictures were lined up in large frames alongside his favourite elemental shots, a skein of geese passing in a chevron across the face of the full moon, a world-famous piece shot by Fiona Spiers, one of his own, from early autumn, a woodcock in sharp and perfect focus while the trees it flew between were only blurred shadows. The centrepiece was the one he’d taken as a boy, a close up shot, so close the edges were distorted, of a dragonfly on a stalk, glittering in the sunlight, while empty paper skin from which it emerged hung down, transparent and useless, and as ugly as the larva from which it had transformed. She strode past the photographs and into the front room. He followed.
“Well?
She had stopped in the middle of the room, winter coat swinging round to catch up with her. She looked neat and capable, a matching beret at a jaunty angle. She was looking down at the scatter of papers and books all over the floor. There were two half empty coffee cups on the table.
“I’ve been seeing her every day. I told you,” he said. “We were working.”
“For the past week?”
“Three days, you know that.”
“I’ve left messages all over the place. You’ve not answered any of them. It’s just not good enough.”
“For God’s sake, June. I’ve been up to my eyes. I just haven’t had time.”
“Don’t you love me any more?” She spat the words out.
That question really caught him on the hop. “Of course I...” he started without thinking. “Yes, of course.” Even as he said it he realised it was a response, a conditioned reflex. She had needed him to say that, right from the beginning of their relationship, driven by the need to love and be loved. For a while he had thought he meant it and after a while he had stopped thinking about it. Now he realised he should have. He had not been entirely fair, with himself or with her.
She turned to look at him. “No you don’t. You really don’t. We’ve been going out for nearly two years and in the past six months I’ve hardly seen anything of you. The last time I did see you, did you stay? No. You gave me some limp-dicked excuse and left.”
“Steady on,” David started to protest. She was all fired up and all her sentences were crammed up against each other, and she was using language he heard every day of the week, but never from her. “That’s a bit unfair. You know I’m in the middle of something important.”
“A dead woman in the shopping mall? A missing girl? That’s hardly the crime of the century. You must be losing your touch or your reputation. But I don’t give a damn about the job. I care about us. What am I supposed to think? Look at me.”
He did. She was standing in the centre of the room, one hand on her hip and the other stretched towards him, a finger jabbing the air. Her nail was long and red and looked as if it could stab him deep enough to draw blood.
“You spend all of your time with her.”
“That’s because she’s a police officer. She works with me. We work together.”
“It’s more than that. In know it. I’m not stupid. Otherwise you’d have stayed with me the other night. But you didn’t stay, did you? You haven’t stayed over in weeks. You won’t move in with me and you won’t let me move in with you. All my other friends are engaged or married. They’ve got children for heaven’s sake. And all the time my clock’s ticking. I don’t want to wait until I’m forty. I can’t wait, don’t you understand?”
“So that’s what this is all about, is it?” David said, quite needlessly. He’d already known that. “It’s about kids.”
“It’s about us, David,” she said passionately, her eyes flashing blue, and right at that moment, he felt ashamed of himself and sorry for her. She had drives he could not, would not, comprehend.
“It’s about us,” she said, voice high and almost desperate. “Us and the future. I can’t wait any more, watching you run around with her, spending all your time working or taking your stupid pictures. I need more than that. I need a relationship and yes, I do want children. I want to be part of something, part of a family.”
“I told you I would think about it,” David said, and again he realised he wasn’t being fair. “It’s a big step.”
“What are you?” she demanded, eyes glittering again. “Are you sterile? Or have you turned gay? I’m beginning to think you might have, for your sex drive seems to have died the death. I remember when you couldn’t get enough.”
Quite involuntarily, David burst out laughing as irritation and guilt and exasperation and sudden anger tumbled inside him. “I can’t be gay if I’m screwing Helen Lamont, can I?”
Her jaw dropped and for an instant he enjoyed it. “Are you telling me...?” her voice trailed away.
“No of course I’m not. It was you who said I was and if that’s what you want to believe, no matter what I say, then it’s up to you.” He stopped, closed his mouth when he realised he was being drawn into this confrontation, reacting in anger. He started again. “ Listen, this is out of order. Let’s just sit down and calm down and talk this through like intelligent adults.” He put his hands out, reaching to place them on her shoulders. She wriggled away from him.
“No,” she said with a quick shake of her head. “I need an answer now. We’re either together or we’re not. I need a commitment and I need it now.”
“What kind of commitment?”
“A real one. Something definite. I don’t want to waste my life hanging around for something that might happen, maybe, some time. Like never. I need to know where I am, where I stand. It’s easy for you, but it’s hellish for me when you’re never with me and when you miss dates and don’t phone. Yes, I want a commitment that says you’ll be where you say you’ll be, and that you’ll take me out and that we can live together and yes, have babies. And honestly David, the way I’m feeling, if I can’t get that commitment, that’s it. End of story.”
There it was, hanging there. He wanted to avoid it, wanted to squirm away from it and spend some more time picking it over, thinking it through. He wasn’t a weak man, not in any real sense, but he hated hurting her, hated hurting anyone except the occasional villain who had a go at him. But he was beginning, however belatedly, to realise that sometimes kindness wore a face of stone.
The silence stretched out for a long, frozen moment while the two of them, stood motionless, protagonists or dancers.
“All right,” he said finally. “You’re right. I haven’t been fair. But I really don’t want to move in. I don’t want to have children, not yet. I don’t want to get married, not yet, and I don’t want to settle down.” He stopped talking, looked at her. “Not yet.”
Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. He held up a hand. “I don’t have the same drives you have. I don’t have the same needs either. I really love my work, honestly, even all the crap that goes with it. And I can’t take you with me when I go up the hills and take pictures, because that’s not your thing. If you want more, then I’m sorry. I can’t give you more, not yet. Maybe,” he started, looking into her eyes and now seeing the need to say the obvious. “Maybe not ever. I’m sorry.”
June rocked back as if she’d been slapped. Her mouth goldfished some more and David felt an unaccustomed tear springing in his own eyes as he picked up her distress. It was an awful moment. For an instant the blood drained from her face and he thought she might faint. Instead, she recovered quickly. Her brows drew down into a frown and her mouth pulled itself into an angry twist. Without warning she moved, striding past him, coat flapping again, he half turned, a word trying to blurt out. She stopped, turned, and then, striking like a snake, she balled her hand into a tight fist and hit him square on the nose.
The tear of anguish and remorse died unborn. Real tears of blinding pain sparkled instantly and made his vision waver.
“Jesus fuggig gryst,” he said.
She stormed past him, through the door, down the hallway. She swiped again and knocked one of pictures from the wall. The world famous Spiers shot of the skein of geese took off, flipped over and landed with a crash of smashing glass. The front door opened, banged hard against the wall.
“Bastard,” she snarled just before the door swung again and slammed shut. The hallway shook with the vibration.