Off Minor

Twenty-five

Naylor had been in and out of schools the entire day. Cups of tea with harassed secretaries while he waited to sit across the desk from even more hard-worked and harassed head teachers; more tea in the furthest corners of staff rooms, where he was regarded with deep suspicion and the Bourbon biscuits were shielded from his sight Although everyone was genuinely shocked by what had happened, they could offer very little that was helpful; some even seeming to begrudge the hasty conversations in cloakrooms that smelled faintly of urine and were constantly interrupted by a litany of “Miss! Miss! Miss! Sir! Sir! Sir!”

Emily had two class teachers, not a perfect state of affairs as the head teacher explained, but the authority was quite committed to maternity leave, whatever its drawbacks. So that morning Naylor talked to a probationer with skin problems and a voice that was designed for singing hymns and telling stories in the book corner. She could shed no light on Emily’s disappearance-a friendly girl, quite bright, not the sort, she thought, to go willingly to strangers. And no, she hadn’t seen anyone loitering around the school, nor Emily with anyone aside from her mother-by that she meant Lorraine. If Diana had been skulking by the gates, she had not been noticed. Naylor thanked her and arranged to return the following afternoon and speak to the supply teacher who took over after lunch.

In the hope that the more recent incident might have jogged something loose in their memories, he traveled the short distance to Gloria Summers’s school, there in the shadow of the high-rises where her brief life had been lived. But it had not.

By three-thirty Naylor was exhausted and thought he now knew why so many teachers had the appearance of marathon runners. Losers, at that. More than anything else, it had to be the kids, the sheer numbers, the noise of which they were capable. Racing across the playground or tumbling over the apparatus, sitting cross-legged close to the piano, heads thrown back and mouths wide open. Another thing Naylor had noticed: if there was one white face among every twenty Asian or black-every thirty in Gloria’s school-it was a surprise.

Naylor tried not to feel that it was wrong, remembering a film set in the States, the South, Mississippi Burning. The racist deputy looking at a black child in his wife’s arms, their maid’s child. Isn’t it amazing, he says, how they can look so cute when they’re little and grow into such animals. Naylor knew that wasn’t what he thought. Animals. Though there were those he worked with that did. Even so-leaving the single-story building with its copperplate signs in English and Urdu, crossing towards the gate where the mothers in richly colored saris waited for their children-was this the sort of school he would want his child to come to? His and Debbie’s? The only white girl in her class. He didn’t see how that could be right.

Not that, if things carried on the way they were, he was going to have a lot of say. Getting into the car, he made up his mind to phone Debbie once he’d finished his report. If it meant he had to speak to her cow of a mother, well and good.

“You mean she’s a lezzie,” Alison said with a laugh.

Patel gestured awkwardly. “Possibly.”

“Well, from what she said. And if this Diana’s been going up there every weekend, there’s obviously something going on.”

“Perhaps …” Patel began.

“Yes?” Alison smirking at him across the top of her glass. They were sitting in the Penthouse Bar of the Royal Hotel; as Patel had put it, an extra ten pence a pint for every floor.

“Perhaps they are simply good friends.”

“Like us?”

“Oh, no. I don’t think we’re such good friends yet.”

“Maybe we never will be.”

“Oh?”

“Maybe I’m gay, too.”

“I don’t think so.”

“How do you know?”

Patel smiled and sipped his lager; he was thinking of the way she had kissed him the moment they had stepped into the lift, not even waiting for the doors to slide shut at their backs.

“What’s the matter with you tonight?”

Raymond scuffed his trainers along the edge of the curb. “Nothing.”

“Well, something’s got into you. You’ve hardly said two words the whole evening.”

“It’s not the whole evening, stupid!”

“Don’t call me stupid.”

“Don’t act like it then. It’s only half-eight, if that.”

“Yeh, well,” Sara scowled, “it feels a lot longer, that’s all I know. Hour with you when you’re in this mood and it’s like forever.”

“Yeh?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s one way of sorting that then, isn’t there?” And Raymond turned on his heels and stalked off across the square, hands in his jeans pockets, ignoring Sara’s belated cry of “Ray-o!” as he kicked out with his foot and sent a score of grubby pigeons into flight over the fountain.

Changing gear as he neared the brow of the hill, Naylor was close to changing his mind as well. Accelerate past the house, drive on round the roundabout, back the way he had come. Back to the place he and Debbie had fixed on together, a starter home on a snug estate, walls so thin there was never the need to feel lonely. Which was what Kevin Naylor had used to think.

He glanced at the mirror, indicated, pulled over. A movement of the curtain as he set the handbrake, released the seat belt, switched off the lights.

Debbie’s mother kept him waiting and then greeted him with a face like vinegar. Was it his imagination or did the interior always smell of disinfectant?

“She’s in there.”

There was the middle room, a dining room, although Naylor couldn’t imagine Debbie’s mother ever inviting anyone to dinner. Unless it was the local undertaker.

Debbie was sitting in the far corner, close to the drawn curtains of the window, upright in a Parker Knoll chair with polished wooden arms that had been in the family since before Debbie was born. The table, both leaves extended, stretched almost the length of the room between them, walnut veneer. A pot plant with oval green leaves leaned to the left in a vain search for light.

Debbie was wearing a black cardigan over a black jumper, a shapeless black skirt that covered her knees. No discernible makeup. Naylor wondered if she had taken vows and if so which ones.

“Hi,” he said, his voice oddly loud in the room, loud enough to have been heard by her mother if she were standing outside the door-which almost certainly she was. “Debbie. How you feeling?”

She glanced up at his face and then allowed her head to fall.

“How’s the baby?”

Now she was looking past Naylor’s left shoulder, unblinking.

“Debbie, the baby …”

“She’s fine.”

“So can I see her?”

“No.”

“Debbie, for Christ’s sake …”

“I said, no.”

“Why on earth not?”

“Because.”

“What kind of an answer is that?”

“The only kind you’re going to get.”

He was round the table then, seeing her fingers grip the arms of the chair tight, squeezing her body back, making herself small as possible. Looking at him now, fear in her eyes.

“I’m not going to hit you,” he said quietly.

“You better not. You …”

“You knew I was coming. You must’ve known I’d want to see her.”

“You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning when was the last time you came round here? When was the last time you as much as tried to see your daughter?”

“That’s because if ever I do, that bloody mother of yours …”

“Leave my mother out of this!”

“Gladly.”

“If it hadn’t been for my mother …”

“We’d’ve still been back home together, the three of us …”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No, we wouldn’t, Kevin.”

“Yes.”

“We wouldn’t, cause another couple of months of that and I’d have been in Mapperley and the baby’d’ve been taken into care.”

Naylor stepped back across the room, banging his hip against the table hard. “Now you’re talking bloody daft!”

“Am I?”

“You know full well you are.”

“Well, ask the doctor, Kevin. Ask her. It’s not an unknown thing for mothers to be depressed after a baby, you know.”

“Depressed? You were …”

“See what I mean? I was ill and all you could do was stay out late drinking, come home and slam around the house before falling asleep downstairs, going off to work in the same clothes you’d come home in. You never did a thing to help me, you never tried to understand …”

“Understand? You’d need to be sodding Einstein to understand you when you’re in one of your moods.”

“Oh, God, Kevin! You don’t even understand now, do you? You really don’t. Moods. That’s all it ever was to you, moods. What’s the matter, Kevin? If there isn’t something I can hold up and show, something like a wound, to show that I’m bleeding, why can’t you understand that I’ve been ill?” She wound her arms tightly about her waist and for the first time Naylor could see how thin she had become. “I still am ill.”

He pulled one of the dining-table chairs awkwardly out and sat down. Inside the wooden clock on the sideboard, time clicked noisily by. What was the point, Kevin Naylor was thinking? I should never have bloody come.

“The baby …”

“She’s sleeping, Kevin. She only just went off before you came.”

“Convenient.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Well, isn’t it?”

“She had me up four times in the night, fretted all day. I daren’t wake her now.”

“So I’ll come back later.”

“Kevin, Mum says …”

“Yes?”

“She says I ought to see a solicitor.”

Naylor snorted. What had he come to say? Come back home, Debbie. A few days at a time first, if you want. We can make it work, you see. Debbie sitting there, looking at him helplessly. Well, now it was never going to work and that was the end of it. So what were those tears doing, pricking at his eyes?

“Kevin?”

He wrenched open the door and there she was, her precious bloody mother, gloating from the other end of the hall. Naylor knew the only thing to stop him punching her sanctimonious face was to get out of there fast. He left the front door open wide, had the key turned in the ignition before he was properly in the seat; he was a couple of hundred yards along the road before he realized he hadn’t even switched on his lights.