Still Midnight

12

Morrow sat in her car as the sun came up over the young trees in Blair Avenue. It had been a warm autumn, plenty of rain and the gardens were bursting with life. Balding branches of well-tended trees shadowed the road and the hedges, verdant, waxy leaved, littered the pavement below. A smattering of rain had cleared the sky to an uninterrupted solid blue.

Her bum was numb. She had been sitting there for forty minutes, tiredness and indecision pinning her to the seat. In every fraction of a second she was poised to reach for the car key, pull it out and open the door. The muscles on her forearm twitched in rehearsal, her mind focused on the plastic casing around the key, the crunch of the lock as she pulled the key out, the warm mottled plastic of the door handle, but still she didn’t move.

She had been there so long that the blood had drained from her hands resting on the steering wheel. Several times she had thought about turning the radio on for company, but that would have meant admitting that she wasn’t going to get out of the car.

She could go back to the station. Bannerman was giving a briefing but she could still hide in her office. She had the day off. She could go into the office and say she couldn’t stay away – never mind that she wouldn’t get overtime – show willing, instead of going indoors and dealing with Brian.

She looked up at the brand new house. All the lights were off, the curtains still drawn in the living room.

This had been her dream once, when she was little, to live in a clean, bland house with a clean, bland husband. A man who would never raise his voice or said anything alarming. A man who never shouted ‘fire’ into her sleeping face in the middle of the night because he was pissed and wanted attention. A man who would never get taken away by the police at 6.15 in the morning and spit saliva streaked with blood on his own hall carpet as they dragged him away.

The Blair Avenue house was new, they were the first people ever to live in it and she savoured the absence of history. They chose it because it was quiet and there were so many children in the neighbourhood.

The front door was painted red, the brass letter box polished, glinting a chirpy answer to the early morning sunlight. She’d liked that door when they bought the house. Most of the new-builds had white plastic doors. It was the first thing she’d liked about it, at the viewing.

‘Look at this, Brian.’ She ran her fingers down the watered sheen of red paint and looked up to find him smiling at her hand. She had looked at his lips and known precisely the words they were going to form.

‘That’s a lovely colour, isn’t it?’

She glared at the door now, her mouth moved soundlessly, reforming the words – that’s a lovely colour.

The straightness of the man was gone, the steadiness she had fallen in love with. Brian had become the chaos she was running from.

The postman’s back suddenly obscured her view. He opened the gate and left it wide as he stepped up the path, looking through a bundle of letters, pulling their junk mail and bills out and shoving them through the door. He didn’t look up as he came back down towards her, already sorting the mail for the next house. Birds twittered in trees. A commuter with a briefcase and grey suit crossed the road to his car. People were beginning to stir. She had to go in or be spotted spying on her own home.

A sudden longing struck her, to see Danny, speak to him, be back in that familiar set of tracks. She knew Danny, understood him, could predict him. He was never a straight line and a sudden curve. Danny was always the same and not sorry about it either.

Somehow in her head the thought of Danny became entangled with the Anwar case because of the area, because they were both at school there. She had never asked for his help before, always kept those worlds as far apart as possible, but she was so angry with Bannerman she was prepared to consider it.

Brian was in there, awake possibly, wondering where she was, why she hadn’t come home, why her phone was switched off.

Reaching for the car key her hand lingered for a moment. She turned it, starting the engine and pulling out into the street, heading back into the vibrant, screaming city.