Off Minor

Thirty

All day they had been getting after Raymond, chasing him from loading bay to loading bay with their shouts, from cutting room to cutting room, pillar to post.

“Raymond! Here, catch a hold of this, will you?”

“Raymond, why don’t you learn to move your bloody self!”

“Raymond, ‘en’t you got that order ready yet?”

“Raymond!”

“Ray!”

“Ray-o, damn you!”

“Ray!”

Hathersage caught him by the neck of his overalls and spun him round, Raymond’s boots slithering on the blood-strewn floor, legs going under him, only Hathersage’s hand, like a ham, holding him aloft. “The Good Lord alone knows what you’re thinking about half the time, you Godforsaken excuse for a human being, but on my old mum’s life I know one thing that it ain’t and that’s what I’m sodding paying you to sodding do. Here. See here!”

Half-dragging Raymond, half-pushing, he urged him out into the yard, barging him through the hollowed-out carcasses of meat that hung in line and throwing him, finally, hard against the open end of a delivery van.

“Lookit!” Hathersage bellowed. “Look in there and just you tell me what you see? Loin chops, you see that? Freezer packs, wrapped and ready? Chuck steak, best chuck steak? Pork belly? Well?”

Raymond leaned heavily against the van, wanting to rub his hip where it had struck metal, wanting to raise his voice back at Hathersage, tell him take your job and stuff it, tell him he didn’t fucking care.

“Look at you, you pathetic specimen!” Hathersage shook his bull-like head. “Christ, if you could see what you looked like, you’d crawl away under a stone and die.”

Raymond, still leaning, was breathing unevenly, snot dribbling down his face, the faint few hairs that grew along his upper lip.

“Here! Take a good look at sodding this!” Hathersage pushed the copy of the order towards Raymond, who caught at it clumsily, tearing it almost in two.

The manager stepped away, disbelieving; two butchers walked by in white headgear and rubber boots, overalls that had been white at the beginning of the day. “Ray-o,” they chanted, softly in unison. “Ray-o, Ray-o, Ray-o.”

“Get this unloaded. Check that order, make it right. If you’re lucky, I won’t be standing at the gate as you dock off, ready with your cards. But don’t sodding bank on it.”

Raymond spent the time until close of his shift praying that Hathersage would be there, giving notice, true to his word. That would be an end to it: this much, at least. But all he had seen of the manager was a reddened face, mouth wide with laughter, glimpsed through the office window as Raymond slunk past.

Tonight was the night, more often than not, he went back home, round to his father’s, where they would eat sausages and onions, mashed potato, baked beans and tomato sauce. Tea strong enough to stand a spoon in. “One thing your mum could never seem to get the knack of,” his dad was like to say, “mashing a good cup of tea.”

Never mind, there had been other things she had mastered; getting the measure of his father, for one. Five years married and Raymond rising four, she had realized his dad had already amounted to what little he was going to be. She had latched herself on to a salesman who went from village shop to village shop, small-town store to small-town store; his special lines were household wares, brushes, clothes lines, pegs, three-in-one dustpan sets in hard red plastic. When he wasn’t on the road, he lived in a caravan at Ingoldmells. Raymond’s mum always had liked the smell of the sea.

The first few years she had sent him cards at Christmas and his birthday. Raymond had kept them for ages, took them out from time to time and ran his hands across the lightly embossed lettering, the fading biro messages, Love from your Mum, Love, Mum, Love, Mum. When he was fourteen he carried them into the back yard and tore them into tiny pieces and left them for the wind to carry away. Even now there were times when he would look inside the drawer, lift out the clothes, expecting them to still be there, safe and flat at the bottom.

Raymond made up his mind: he wasn’t going home. No more of his father’s and his uncle’s jostling, himself caught in the middle. Sara, he knew, was staying in to help her mother wash her hair. He didn’t care. After his bath, he could sit in his room, watch TV, play with his knife.

Michael Morrison pushed his dinner around the plate until Lorraine lifted it away and scooped the contents into the rubbish. She gave him two scoops of his favorite ice cream, raspberry ripple, straight from the freezer, and he sat there, watching it slowly melt. Since the television appearance, any remaining energy seemed to have been drained from him, little more than twelve hours and they had changed places again, Lorraine finding the resources somewhere to carry him through what remained of the day. Another since Emily had disappeared, a scattering of dolls in her wake.

Of course, she could still be safe.

Of course.

The telephone broke into life and before Lorraine could reach it, had fallen silent again. She stood staring at it, willing it to ring again.

“Perhaps,” she said, back in the kitchen, “we should get in touch with your brother?”

“Geoffrey? For God’s sake, why?”

“What he said, the reward …”

“No.”

“Michael, I don’t see why not.”

“You know what the police said about that.”

“Yes, but there’s nothing else. They haven’t come up with anything else.”

“Even so.” He got up and broke the seal on the Scotch, daring Lorraine to say anything. What she did was fill the kettle to make herself a cup of tea.

“Look,” Michael said, “if I thought it would be any good …”

“All I’m saying, I don’t see what we’ve got to lose.”

Michael hardly tasted the whisky as it went down; he drank some more. “Ever since I can remember,” he said, “my brother has tried to run my life. Michael, wake up, you should be doing this, doing that. Michael, Michael, if only you were bright enough, quick enough, had the balls enough, you’d be more like me.”

“He’s only trying to do the best …”

“What he wants is for me to get close enough to him that I can see the distance there is between us.”

She slipped inside his arms, inside his guard and kissed the corner of his mouth. “I don’t want you to be like Geoffrey.”

“I know.” Michael closing his eyes, lowering his face against her hair. “I know.”

She pressed her fingers lightly against his back, the knot of bone near the base of his spine; when he didn’t move away, push her clear, she slid his shirt free from his belt and began to stroke his skin.

“Lorraine,” he breathed. “Lorraine.”

“All I was thinking,” Lorraine said, “even if nothing comes of it, what harm would it really do?”

Two things Stephen Sheppard did at half-past nine every night: lock and bolt both front and back doors, check the latches on the downstairs windows; when that was done he would prepare the tray. Horlicks for Joan, nothing to drink for himself or he’d be up and down like a yo-yo. Four biscuits, buttered, two with a nice piece of mature cheddar, the others with a dabble of jam, blackcurrant or apricot; the cheese was for himself. Rumor was that cheese at night made you dream, but he set no more store by that than he did by any other old wives’ tale. It wasn’t four years back that Joan had talked him into seeing that fortune teller at Goose Fair. A long and happy life, she’d said. Expect good news at work, promotion. What he’d got was the sack. Nothing regular since. Pushing fifty-what was he thinking of? He was fifty, gone-most firms didn’t even bother to reply. Ah, well, they hadn’t settled into such a bad life, after all.

He opened the door first, went back for the tray. He could hear the theme music for News at Ten just beginning, just in time.

Lynn Kellogg had been in the car, seat belt buckled, when she realized she didn’t want to go straight back. The thought of the bundle of clothes she had left close by the ironing board enough to put her off. Divine and Naylor were where she expected to find them, Divine over at the corner of the bar, deep in conversation with a tall West Indian, which probably meant that he was after information. Social drinking for Divine rarely extended beyond the color bar.

She bought a half of bitter for herself, a pint for Kevin Naylor and joined him near the window. From the edges of the room came the electronic clamor of games machines, through the ropey pub stereo Phil Collins was making promises he couldn’t keep. Lynn liked Phil Collins: that spring she’d gone across to Birmingham by coach to see him, the NEC, seats had been naff, but he’d been good, really good.

“How’s it going?” Lynn asked.

“Don’t ask.”

She drank some beer and let it be; he’d talk in his own good time or not at all, that was Kevin.

“It’s all gone to crap,” he said suddenly, moments later. She thought he was talking about the investigation and quickly realized it was something else. “Debbie’s back home with her mum, properly moved back in, and she’s taken the kid with her. Absolute bloody crap!”

“Oh, Kevin,” Lynn took his free hand and gave it a squeeze. “I’m sorry.”

“Yes, well, I’m up to here with being sorry and it don’t make a scrap of sodding difference.”

“Can’t you talk to her, reason …?”

“Shut it!” Naylor said suddenly and Lynn jerked back as though she’d been slapped. It was only when she looked at Kevin’s face that she realized his response had been to the television set above the bar and not to what she had said.

The artist’s impression of the man seen outside the Morrison home was still on the screen, a lined face with a strong nose, close shaven, beginning to lose his hair.

“Kevin, what is it?”

“That bloke. I only know him, don’t I? I was only talking to him this afternoon.”