Off Minor

Forty-three

This was the bit of the city Raymond hated most, from Millets and Marks all the way down to where Sara worked, past C amp; A. And as the week wore on it got worse. What with the veggie lot outside the church, pushing petitions in your face about political prisoners or factory farming, all the lefties expecting you to pay good money for a paper that didn’t have sport or tell you what was on telly, and then the cranks carrying placards and reading from the Bible, it was a regular nightmare. “Whole bloody lot of them,” his dad said, “want locking up.” Raymond didn’t usually go a bomb on what his father had to say, but in this case he’d got it about right.

He didn’t spot Sara at first, disappointed, thinking maybe she’d taken the day off, but then there she was, coming into the shop from the storeroom at the back. Raymond waited till she was refilling the sections before going inside.

Sara, who’d already seen him, seen him through the glass, carried on with what she was doing, even when he was standing at her shoulder.

“What’s going on?” Raymond asked.

“What d’you mean?”

“Why aren’t you talking to us?”

“You can see,” using the metal scoop to round out the strawberry delights, “I’m doing this.” Turning to face him: “Raymond, I’m busy.”

“I was only saying hello.”

“Hello.”

“Seemed stupid hanging around at home, you know, I was ready. I thought I’d come and see you, hang around outside.”

Sara glanced over at the manageress who was watching them with a face like alabaster; she moved along three bins and began to restock the old-fashioned bull’s-eyes. “There’s no need you waiting around anyway,” she said.

“I thought we were going out?”

“Yes, well, we’re not.”

“What d’you mean …?”

“Raymond, keep your voice down, do.”

“You said tonight was all right.”

“So it was. Only now it’s not.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve got to help my mum.”

Raymond grabbed hold of her arm. “You mean you don’t want to see me. That’s it, isn’t it? Except you haven’t got the guts to come right out and say it.”

The manageress was coming towards them, a beeline across the floor, Raymond’s fingers were poking hard into her arm and she was sure they’d left a bruise already.

“Sara?” the manageress called.

“Tomorrow,” Sara said. “After work tomorrow. I promise. Now go. Go.”

“Sara,” the manageress said, “you know we have a rule about this sort of thing.”

“Yes, Miss Trencher,” Sara said, coloring visibly.

Miss Trencher, Raymond thought, was an ugly cow in need of a good shagging. From behind, face down in a tub of tripes. Hands in pockets, Raymond slouched towards the exit, taking his time.

“Is he a friend of yours, Sara?”

“Not really,” said Sara, still blushing.

“Because I don’t want him in this shop again. Apart from anything else, he smells.”

Some days Resnick was happy enough to stand in line at the delicatessen counter while one or other of the assistants chattered in Polish to an elderly man in an ill-fitting suit, a plump woman with a string shopping bag, choosing seven different kinds of sausage and telling the latest about her cousin in Lodz. This particular afternoon, he fretted and fussed and finally interrupted, earning himself no goodwill observing that the sell-by date on marinaded herrings might be reached before he got the chance to buy them.

By the time he lowered his carrier bag-half a pound of herring, three-quarters of liver sausage, a quarter of black olives, cheese cake, sour cream-to the floor by the coffee stall and climbed on to his stool, he was in no mood to find Suzanne Olds smiling her supercilious smile from the opposite side of the counter.

“Cappuccino?” asked Marcia, a hefty girl, good-humored, who rode a motor cycle and played bass guitar in a rock band.

“Espresso.”

“Small or full?”

“Full.”

“I’ll get this,” Suzanne Olds said, coming round to take the stool alongside him.

“No, it’s okay,” Resnick said.

Suzanne Olds slid her shoulder bag on to the shelf beneath the counter. “Something to go with it?” she asked, indicating the stacks of doughnuts and scones under their plastic cover.

Resnick shook his head.

“Hmm,” she smiled, eyeing the way his stomach seemed to fold over his waistline, “probably just as well.”

Resnick sat straighter and sucked himself in. Marcia set his espresso in front of him and Suzanne Olds gave her a five-pound note, keeping her hand out for the change. “If my client goes ahead with taking you to court, you might need every penny you possess.”

“Kilpatrick?”

“Uh-hum.”

“I’m sure you’re giving him better advice than that. And besides, from what I hear I doubt if he’d want his sexual preferences all over the news.”

Suzanne Olds slowly raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t have you marked down as a prude.”

Resnick tasted his espresso. “One more mistake,” he said.

Suzanne Olds laughed but sensed that probably it was true. In a half-drunken moment once, too much champagne too fast after a famous victory, she had not as much propositioned him as made it clear were he to proposition her, she would be neither shocked nor offended. Resnick had made it clear that their relationship, limited and professional as it was, was already close to the boundaries of what he could take.

“Emily Morrison,” Suzanne Olds said, “still not been found?”

Another shake of the head.

“No closer to getting a lead?”

Gloria’s grandmother had thought she’d recognized the drawing of Stephen Shepperd as someone she remembered from the school, but had no sense of ever seeing him with Gloria. The head teacher had been pushed again over the cloakroom incident, with the result that now she was becoming uncertain whether Gloria had been there at all. Lynn Kellogg had met Joan Shepperd at the end of the school day and earned pursed lips and frosty stares. “No,” Resnick said. “Not a lot.” He was finishing his espresso as he reached down for his bag. “Thanks for the coffee,” he said, hurrying away.

“I’m here to see Debbie,” Lynn Kellogg said, Debbie’s mother implacable in Crimplene on the doorstep.

“Are you a friend?”

“Not exactly. I do know her though.”

“You’re a friend of Kevin’s.” It wasn’t quite like being accused of carrying a contagious disease, but similar.

“Kevin and I work together, yes.”

“I don’t think Debbie will want to see you.”

Lynn adopted a stance which said she wasn’t about to be got rid of easily. “I think she should,” she said.

If there had been anywhere to walk to, that’s what they would have done, but they sat in Lynn’s car instead. Debbie, Lynn thought, was partly pleased to be out of the house, away from her mother, partly disturbed, as if uncertain how she should act, what she should say.

As it grew colder and darker around them, they talked about the baby, about Debbie’s attempts to get another part-time job, clothes, anything other than what each knew they were there to talk about.

“How’s Kevin?” Lynn said suddenly, right across the middle of something Debbie was saying about teething rings.

“I don’t know,” she faltered.

“You’ve seen him though?”

“Once. Only once, recently. It wasn’t any good. It was hopeless.”

“How d’you mean?”

“We rowed. We just rowed.”

“What did you expect?” said Lynn sharply.

“Well …”

“Well, what?”

“What’s the point, if when we do see one another, after all that time, all we do is fight?”

“Surely, that’s because it has been all that time.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Look,” turning square-on in her seat, an arm close to Debbie’s head, “why you split up, reasons, who left who, none of that’s my business. But given that’s happened, I don’t see what you can expect to do but argue. Least, at first.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“The point is to try and sort things out. Argue them through. Things went wrong. You’re not about to fall into one another’s arms, lovey-dovey. It’s got to be worked at and that’s not going to be easy, but it’s got to be done.” She waited for Debbie to look at her again. “Unless you really do want it to be over. In which case I think you should be honest and say so, get on with getting a divorce.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Debbie didn’t answer; she looked out of the window instead, at the line of almost identical houses in which lights shone. At a twelve-year-old boy with a red and white wool hat, skateboarding along the pavement, rocking himself up and down over the curb. It was cold enough inside the car for gooseflesh to have formed along the length of her arms; at least, she thought it was the cold.

“He’s the baby’s father,” Lynn said.

“He doesn’t act like it.”

“Then maybe that’s what you should talk about, then give him another chance.”

Debbie looked away again, staring straight through the windscreen now, a pretty face with a small mouth and a tiny scar to the left of her chin.

“He came round to see me the other night,” Lynn said quietly. “Round to my place, it was late.” Debbie was looking at her now, right at her, not missing a look, a word. “Oh, nothing happened. We had coffee, talked. Talked about you. But it could have, and someday soon it will. Not with me, I don’t mean that. But someone. And not because Kevin wants that, but he wants somebody. He wants you and he wants the baby and he can’t find the way to say it.” Lynn smiled. “Debbie, you married him, you know what he’s like. He needs your help, he has to know that you want him back and right now all he can see is that you’re shutting him out.”

Lynn touched Debbie’s forearm lightly. “I think you should phone him. One way or another, that’s what you ought to do. And Debbie, don’t leave it too long.”

Almost out of the building, Resnick turned right around and went back up to his office. He found the university number in the book and Vivien’s home number also, V. Nathanson, nice and neutral. The other night at her flat he had been a grouch and a bore and it wouldn’t hurt him to call her up and tell her so. Apologize and suggest, perhaps, another meeting, another drink.

It took him ten minutes to realize that he was going to do no such thing. Screwing up the piece of paper on which he had written both numbers, Resnick tossed it into his wastebin as he switched out the light.

“Great!” Lynn Kellogg said stepping into her flat and looking round. “Just great!” There were piles of washing on both of the chairs, waiting to be ironed. Bills behind the clock waiting to be paid and the clock itself had stopped around an hour and twenty minutes earlier, battery run down. On the table were the only two letters she’d received in the past week, both from her mother and both waiting to be answered. She knew without looking that there was a can of Diet Pepsi in the fridge, a wrinkled tube of tomato puree and little else. “Such an authority on other people’s lives, it’s a shame you can’t do something about your own!”