Off Minor

Twenty-one

“Are you married?”

Lynn Kellogg shook her head. “No.”

“Must be difficult, a job like yours. If you were, I mean. Shift work, things like that.”

“Yes,” Lynn said, “I suppose so.”

“Still,” Lorraine Morrison tried for a smile and missed, “plenty of time yet.”

Tell that to my mother, Lynn thought.

They were sitting at the back of the house, the living room, French windows out on to the garden towards which Lorraine’s eyes kept returning: as if Emily would be miraculously there, the same old game continuing, dolls and babies and mummies and prams, happy, happy families.

“I was nineteen,” Lorraine said, “when I met Michael. We were in this restaurant. Mama Mia. I’d gone there with a bunch of girls from where I worked. The bank. Somebody’s leaving do, you know?”

Lynn nodded. The traffic noise from the main road nearby was ever-present, dull, cushioned by double glazing. They had been sitting there long enough for their too-weak coffee to grow cold, for Lynn to marvel at the correctness of everything in its place, the vases, the cushions with their bright floral blues and greens, the print of pink ballet dancers on the wall. Earlier that day, when Lynn had first arrived, she had found Lorraine lifting ornaments and picture frames and dusting underneath. She imagined Lorraine as a child, following her mother from room to room with the Hoover, watching, cleaning, falling into step. Here she was, younger than Lynn by a good six years, already married, a husband, a house, a missing child …

“I suppose we must have been making a lot of noise,” Lorraine was saying, “the way people do, evenings like that. Michael was there with this other man, business. After a while he came over, tapped me, you know, on the shoulder. He and his friend had been having a bet on what it was we all did. I told him and he laughed and called out that he’d won. Next day, I looked up from the counter and there he was, half-way down the queue. ‘You didn’t tell me which branch,’ he said, when he got to the window. ‘I’ve been walking my feet off all over the city center.’ The cashiers either side of me were listening, one of them laughed and I could feel myself going red. He pushed a check through to me and it wasn’t even the right bank. I asked him what he was doing. ‘I thought you could endorse it,’ he said. ‘Address and telephone number on the back.’ As much to get rid of him as anything else, I did.

“‘You’re asking for trouble,’ one of the other girls said. ‘Married man. He is good looking though, nice clothes.’

“‘How d’you know he’s married?’ I said. He hadn’t been wearing a ring, I had noticed that.

“First time I went out with him I asked him and he laughed and said, ‘No, what kind of a bloke do you think I am?’ After we’d been seeing one another for maybe a month, he told me that he was. I went mad, really screaming at him, calling him a liar, all sorts. ‘Steady, steady,’ he said, catching hold of my hands. ‘I didn’t tell you before ’cause there wasn’t any point.’

“What do you mean?’ I said.

“‘I wasn’t in love with you then,’ he said.”

Michael had phoned in and asked for time off, compassionate leave. When Lynn had arrived at the house, he had been on the point of going outside, running the gauntlet of the news photographers, the video cameramen. She had persuaded him it was not, perhaps, the best idea, since when he had stayed in the kitchen, blinds closed, chain-smoking and working his way through a bottle of Bulgarian wine.

“Fifteen years older than me, Michael. It’s all my mum could think about, that and the fact that he’d been divorced. Fifteen years.” She glanced at Lynn. “I don’t think that’s a lot, do you?”

Lynn shook her head. “Not necessarily.”

“‘By the time you’re thirty,’ my mum used to say ‘he’ll be forty-five. Middle-aged. Have you thought of that?’ “Lorraine was on her feet by the French window: a robin was squatting near the edge of the lawn, so still that it could have been a plastic toy. “It’s not as if,” Lorraine said, “he acts his age. Not, you know, old. Only since he lost his job, had to take another miles away, all the traveling, well, he gets tired. I mean, he’s bound to. Anybody would. His age, that’s got nothing to do with it.”

Lynn stood up, smoothing down her skirt. She didn’t know about Michael, but being around Lorraine somehow made her feel young and old at the same time. Lorraine was the kind of girl Lynn hated sharing a communal changing room with whenever she was buying something to wear; there she’d be, struggling into a size twelve, glance up and there’s this kid with a model-girl figure sliding down into a ten with inches to spare. Remember Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys? The scene where they take her out for new clothes and one of the Baker Boys, one of the Bridges brothers, says to her, “What are you? A ten?” and she just looks at him and says, “An eight.”

Lynn loved the film, had seen it three times, but that really got to her. An eight!

Lorraine had time and money to spend on herself as well; hair done each week and more than the occasional hour on the sun bed. Where else was she going to get that tan, that shine on her skin?

“If I could use your phone,” Lynn said, “I’ll check in with the station.”

Raymond had been fifteen minutes late for work and Hathersage had given him a proper bollocking in front of half a dozen others, enough to bring tears to the corners of Raymond’s eyes as he stood there, head down, smarting. An inch away from chucking it all in, asking for his cards, walk right out of there and go into town, maybe Sara was on early lunch. But he stuck it out, as much afraid of what his father would say when he found out, his dad and his uncle Terry, organizing his life for him between rounds at the pub.

Raymond kept his head down and kept on working: the day hadn’t been invented that lasted for ever.

All around radios crackled about him as he moved, none quite tuned to 96.3, their sounds all but drowned beneath the loud, mechanical swearing of the men, the high whine of electric saws, the thump of cleavers hammering down. Offloading a fork-lift truck, Raymond missed Emily Morrison’s name on the news report, but registered what had happened, a young girl missing from home.

“Look at you now! Clumsy young bugger!” bawled Hathersage, passing through. “Want to keep your mind on what you’re sodding doing!”

Raymond’s mumbled apology went unheard, scrabbling as he was, down on his hands and knees among ox livers, deep dark red.