Cutting Edge

Nine

“Debbie!”

Kevin Naylor pushed the front door to, slipped his keys into his coat pocket and listened. Only the hum of the freezer from the kitchen. Faint, the sound of early evening television from next door. Walls of new estates like these, you need never feel you were all alone. Perfect for the first-time buyer, one point off your mortgage for the first year, wait until you’d painted, roses in the garden, turf for the lawn, something more than money invested before they hit you with the full rate, fifteen and a half and rising. A couple across the crescent, one kid and another on the way, they’d had their place repossessed last month, moved in with her parents, Jesus!

“Debbie?”

There were dishes in the bowl, more stacked haphazardly alongside the sink. In a red plastic bucket, tea towels soaking in bleach. Kevin flipped down the top of the rubbish bin and then lifted it away; the wrapping from packets of biscuits lying there, thin coils of colored Cellophane pushed down between torn cardboard, treacle tart, deep-dish apple pie. He knew that if he checked in the freezer the tubs of supermarket ice cream would be close to empty.

The neighbor switched channels and began to watch the evening news.

The baby’s room was neat, neater than the rest; creams and talc on the table near the window, a carton of disposable nappies with its top bent back. A mobile of brightly colored planets that Lynn had bought at the baby’s birth dangled above the empty cot, suns and moons and stars.

“Where’s the baby?”

Debbie was a shape beneath the striped duvet, fingers of one hand showing, her wrist, a wedding ring. Light brown hair lifelessly spread upon the pillow. Kevin sat on the edge of the bed and she flinched; her hand, clenching, disappeared.

“Deb?”

“What?”

“Where’s the baby?”

“Who cares?”

He grabbed at her, grabbed at the quilt, pulling at it hard, tugging it from her hands; she pushed her hands down between her knees, curling in upon herself, eyes closed tight.

“Debbie!”

Kneeling on the bed, Kevin struggled to turn her over and she kicked out, flailing her arms until he had backed away, allowing her to seize the duvet again and pull it against her, sitting at the center of the bed, eyes, for the first time, open. She loathed him. He could see it, read it in those eyes. Loathed him.

“Where is she?”

“At my mother’s.”

Kevin Naylor sighed and looked away.

“Is that wrong? Is it? Well? What’s wrong with that, Kevin? What’s so terrible about that?”

He got up and crossed the room, opening drawers, closing them.

“Well?”

“What’s wrong,” he said, facing her, fighting to keep his voice calm, “is that’s where she was this morning, yesterday, the day before.”

“So?”

Kevin made a sound somewhere between a snort and a harsh, humorless laugh.

“She is my mother, Kevin. She is the baby’s grandmother. It’s only natural …”

“That she should look after her all the time?”

“It isn’t all the time.”

“Good as.”

“She’s helping …”

“Helping!”

“Kevin, please! I get tired. You know I get tired. I can’t help it. I …”

He stood at the end of the bed, staring down at her in disgust, waiting for the tears to start. There. “If want to see my own child,” he said, “I have to make a phone call, make sure she isn’t sleeping, get back into the car and drive half-way across the fucking city!”

He slammed the door so that it shook against its hinges. Switched on the radio so that he couldn’t hear the sound of her sobbing. On either side of them, television sets were turned up in direct retaliation. At least, Kevin thought, when their kids cry I can sodding hear them.

There were tins of baked beans in the cupboard, packets of soup, chicken and leek, chicken and asparagus, plain chicken; four or five slices of white bread inside the wrapper but outside the bread bin. Eggs. Always too many of those. He could send out for a pizza, drive off for a take-away, curry or Chinese.

On the radio someone was pontificating about mad cow disease, the effects it might have on children, force-fed beefburgers for school dinners. Kevin switched it off and instantly he could hear Debbie, bawling. He switched back on, changed stations. Del Shannon. Gem-AM. Poor sod who shot himself. Well …

There was one can of lager left in the back of the fridge and he opened it, tossing the ring pull on to the side and taking the can into the living room. If Debbie’s mother were there, she’d be tut-tutting, Kevin, you’re not going to drink that without a glass, surely? But she wasn’t there, was she? Back in her own little semi in Basford, caravan outside the front window and his bloody kid asleep in her spare room.

He scooped the remote control from beside the armchair and pressed Channel Three. Might as well have the whole street watching together, synchronized bloody viewing. Nothing on he wanted till the football at half past ten, bit of boxing.

Thinking of going over the side, Lynn had said in the canteen. Maybe, he thought, over the side and never coming back.

When Tim Fletcher woke he saw the roses and then he saw Sarah Leonard and he knew something wasn’t right. She was standing at an angle to the bed; her staff nurse’s uniform had been exchanged for a long, beige cotton coat, broad belt loosely tied and high epaulettes. Maybe she was still wearing the uniform underneath, but he didn’t think so.

“Karen …” he said.

“She went a long time ago.”

Fletcher nodded.

“Girls her age,” Sarah said, “they get restless. Haven’t the patience.”

She was, Fletcher thought, what, all of twenty-seven herself, twenty-eight.

“I just popped in,” she said, “to see how you were getting on.”

“How am I?”

She smiled. “You’re the doctor.”

He glanced down at his pillows. “You couldn’t …”

“Prop you up a bit? I expect so.”

She leaned him forward against her shoulder as she plumped and patted the pillows, the inside of his arm pressing against her breast. “Overtime, this.” Her face was close and he could feel her breath. Sarah leaned him back into the pillows and stood back.

“Thanks.”

“There’s nothing else you want?”

Fully awake now, the pain was back in his leg, not sharp the way he might have imagined, but dull, persistent, throbbing. A nerve twitched suddenly in his hand and he winced, twice, biting down into his bottom lip. At least there was still a nerve there to twitch. “No,” he said. “I’m fine.”

She raised her head. “I’ll look in tomorrow.” She was almost out of earshot when his voice brought her back.

“You off home now?”

“Soon.”

“Walking?”

“Yes.”

“Be careful.”

Resnick arrived home to find the front door open on the latch and Miles pressing his nose against it while Pepper nervously kept watch. His immediate thought was that the house had been burgled, but a quick check proved this not to be so. Bud was lying on the top step of the stairs, ready for flight. Dizzy and Ed Silver were neither of them to be seen, off about their business, hard into the night.

Ed’s note was propped against the edge of the frying pan, Out for a quick one, back soon. He had washed the plate but not the knife and fork, rinsed out his cup and left the tea stewing dark and cold inside the pot. Three tea bags. The bacon and the sausage he had found in Resnick’s fridge, the oven chips he would have had to fetch from the grocer’s on the main road. Also, the half-bottle of cheap Greek brandy, empty between the cats’ bowls.

Resnick picked up Bud and nuzzled him, conscious of the animal’s ribs like something made from a kit, balsa wood and glue. He dropped his coat over the back of a chair and, carrying the cat with him, pulled an Ellington album from the shelf. “Jack the Bear,” “Take the A Train,” “KoKo.” His friend, Ben Riley, twelve years in the job before he left for America, had sent him a card from New York. Charlie-Finally got to take the “A” train. Head-to-toe graffiti, inside and out, and anyone white gets off below 110th Street. Stay home. Stick to the music. Ben, he’d stayed there: Resnick hadn’t heard from him in more than two years, four.

Ed Silver had scorned the Czech Budweiser and Resnick opened a bottle and slowly drank it as he sliced a small onion carefully into rounds and overlapped them along two slices of dark rye bread. He covered these with Polish ham, then cut slivers of Jarlsberg cheese. Backtracking to the fridge, he found one solitary pickled cucumber, set rounds of this on the ham, then added the cheese.

The grill was gathering heat when he stood the sandwiches, open-faced, beneath it and finished the first beer, rolling his hand across his stomach as he reached for another.

When the cheese was brown and bubbling, he forked some coleslaw on to a plate, used a slice to lift up the sandwiches and set them down next to the coleslaw, balanced two jars of mustard, Dijon and mixed grain, on the rim, pushed his index finger down into the neck of the Budweiser bottle and headed back for the living room.

Ben Webster was just beginning his solo on “Cotton Tail,” rolling that phrase over the rhythm section, springy and strong from Blanton’s bass, round and round and rich, like rolling it round a barrel of treacle. Just when it seemed to have become stuck, sharp little phrases from the brass digging it out, and then the saxophone lifting itself with more and more urgency, up, up and into the next chorus.

Resnick wondered what it must be like, being able to do anything with such force, such grace. Would he see Ed Silver that evening or the next and in what state? You spent half a lifetime striving to reach a point of perfection and then one night, one day, for no reason that any onlooker could see, you opened your fingers and watched as it all slipped away.

In their two-bedroom, two-story house, Debbie Naylor had fallen back to sleep, mouth open, lightly snoring. Kevin still sat in the chair before the television, watching, soundlessly, as two boxers moved around the square ring, feinting, parrying, never quite connecting.

Tim Fletcher lay on his back, awake in the half-light, counting stitches, trying to sleep.

Like a metronome, the even click of Sarah Leonard’s low heels, along the pavement leading from the bridge.