Rough Treatment

Thirty

Jack Skelton had scarcely slept at all and when he had he had stirred restlessly, a ragged turning from one side to the other. Even so, it was his wife who woke first, alerted by the cautious opening of the door.

“Jack,” she said, hushed, her hand pushing at his back. “Jack, wake up.”

With a small groan, Skelton rolled towards the center of the bed, levering himself into a sitting position. Kate stood in shadow just inside the doorway, looking towards them. When Skelton spoke her name she turned and left the room, the door open behind her.

Standing, Skelton refastened his pajamas and slipped on his dressing gown. “Go back to sleep.” He kissed his wife high on the cheek. It was a little after three in the morning.

Kate sat on one of the kitchen stools, dribbling honey from the blade of a knife down on to a slice of bread she had already smeared with peanut butter. Her skin was sallow spots, small and white and without heads, clustered above and below the corners of her eyes and close to her hairline. When she had arrived back from the police station the previous afternoon, she had gone straight to her room and locked the door. Aside from visits to the bathroom, she had not emerged until now. Sandwiches and tea that had been left on a tray outside had remained untouched. She had not spoken a word to her parents, not to either of them.

Skelton watched the thin sweet line falling from his daughter’s hand. In rather less than three hours there was a meeting at the station, the latest information to be appraised, final decisions to be taken, briefings to be given. All of that had to happen, regardless.

“They’ll send me to prison, won’t they?”

“No.”

“’Course they will.”

“I shouldn’t think it will even go to court.”

“Why not?”

“Because it won’t.”

“Because of who I am, you mean?”

“No, that isn’t what I mean.”

“Yes, it is. ’Cause I’m your daughter.”

“That won’t have anything to do with it.”

“Yeah!” Kate laughed harshly, turning her head sharply away. “Not much it won’t.”

“You make it sound as though you want to be convicted.”

“They send some poor twenty-year-old with a baby to Holloway for not paying her TV license, why not me?”

Skelton fidgeted on his stool, sighed. “Because of your age, the lack of previous convictions, all manner of reasons.”

“Like my family.”

Skelton looked at her.

“That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what the solicitor or whatever will say. Good home, caring parents. Good family. They’ll say that, won’t they?”

“Probably.”

He looked at her for a while and then asked. “Would it be so far from the truth?”

Kate twisted the knife then put the end of the blade between her lips, licking it clean. “Not what the papers will say, is it? If they get hold of it.”

Skelton wanted to make another cup of tea; he wanted to go to the bathroom and pee. He watched as Kate began to spread the honey here and there across the peanut butter, as though making a painting with a palette knife. He knew all too well what the newspapers would make of it, should it get out.

“Kate …”

He stopped himself, but not before she had followed where his eyes were pointing. Some of the honey had started to run across the surface of the table. “That’s it,” she said, “your daughter’s been done for shoplifting and all you’re worried about is getting the kitchen in a mess.”

“I’m sorry,” Skelton said.

She jumped up and tore away several pieces of kitchen roll. “Here,” pushing them into his hands, “wipe it up. Clean and tidy before she comes down.”

“Kate …”

“There, go on. Every last little …”

Skelton threw the paper in her face, lunged forward with his arm and swept everything from the table. The knife clattered against the front of the microwave, the bread landed face down, the honey jar shattered and stuck where it fell. For the first time since she had been very small, Kate looked into the anger of her father’s face and was frightened.

“Jack?” came the voice from the stairs. “What happened?”

“Nothing. It’s all right. Go back to bed.”

“I heard a crash.”

“It’s all right.”

Slippered steps and the closing of the bedroom door. Kate opened the cupboard beneath the sink to take out a dustpan and brush.

“Leave it,” Skelton said.

“It won’t take a minute.”

“Kate. Kate. Please. Leave it be.” He reached out to take the dustpan from her hands and she flinched as if he were going to strike her. Skelton stepped back, shoulders slumped. When she looked at him, her face was still angled away.

“All right,” she said.

“What?”

She ran the tap and lifted a glass down from a cupboard, drank a little of the water before turning the glass on to the draining board, face down. “Now this has happened,” she said, back to him not looking at him, “there’s no way you can’t find out the rest.”

“Is that the baby?” Kevin Naylor asked, struggling from sleep.

But, of course, Debbie was already awake.

“I thought I heard the baby.”

She was sitting more or less upright, her pillows flattened back behind her, the front of her nightdress buttoned to the neck. A paperback book, a guide to Greece, a country Debbie had never visited nor expressed any desire to visit, was folded open on the bedside table. It had been there for four nights, five, exactly the same position.

“I’ll just go and check,” Kevin swung his legs around beneath the duvet.

“Stay there, I’ll go.”

“It’s all right …”

“Go back to bed.” He was on his feet but Debbie was already over by the door. Her face looked small and severe; her lips were slightly parted and the overbite at the front of her teeth was visible. “Go to sleep.”

More definite this time, a half-whimper, half-cry from the next room.

“Maybe she was dreaming,” Kevin said.

Debbie laughed.

“Likely she’ll turn over, go right off again.”

“No, Kevin. That’s you. That’s what you do, remember?”

“That’s not fair.”

“It’s true.”

“It’s still not fair.”

“So you say.” She was glaring at him, the folds of her cotton nightdress clutched at her waist. The crying was becoming more insistent, higher pitched. Kevin moved towards the bedroom door but she stood in his way.

“Come on, Debbie.”

“No.”

“Come on.”

“No!”

Kevin stepped back, looked at the carpet, the way Debbie’s toes curled down into the pile. The noise was shrill and angry.

“You still think it’s just a dream?”

“No. I don’t know. A nightmare, perhaps. I don’t know.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t. You can’t.” With the insides of her bunched fists she was beating against him now, driving him back, slowly, across the room. “You can’t! You can’t! You can’t!”

Sometimes he caught at her wrists, her arms and held on until he felt whatever it was dissipate inside her, other times he backed off against the wall and allowed her to hit him, over and over, until her strength had gone and the tears came in its place. Tonight the noise from the cot was too urgent for either.

Kevin side-stepped around her, so that she was striking at air. She made a flailing grab for him, easily avoided.

“Kevin, come back here!”

He carried on through the bedroom, towards the baby’s room, not looking back.

“Kevin! Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare!”

The baby had got herself all twisted round inside the cot, white lacy covers kicked into a corner, finally, one leg trapped inside the bars. Kevin reached carefully down and freed her, easing her up into his arms. Her face was plump and red from crying; he held her high against his chest, her head on his shoulder, patting her back softly, saying, “Sshh, sshh.”

But she wouldn’t shush: not yet.

He began to walk around the room with her, round and around the cot. Sometimes that worked, but not tonight. Once he thought it had happened; the noise cut off suddenly, but it was no more than punctuation, breath caught in the throat and held. This time when he walked he came face to face with Debbie standing in the doorway. She had been crying too, she was paler than before, her hair had a peculiar quality, seeming to have neither color nor shape, to be just hair.

When Debbie held out her arms, Kevin placed the baby inside them and by the time he had lain back in the bed she had stopped crying.

“Oh, God, Jack! She could have AIDS, anything!”

“Not this way, she couldn’t.”

“Yes. All those teenagers living rough. You saw that program. That’s how they catch it.”

Skelton smoothed his hand along the inside of his wife’s arm; her eyes widened and startled, as if caught in a sudden light. “Not without injecting.”

She looked back at him, uncomprehending.

“You have to inject.”

“But you said drugs. You said Kate …”

“The HIV virus, you catch it from the needle, a dirty needle. It’s not the drug itself.”

“What are you saying, then? She’s just been smoking pot, cannabis?”

Skelton shook his head. “LSD. Sometimes amphetamines. Mostly LSD.”

“And you believe that’s all? You believe her?”

Skelton could still see his daughter’s face and understood that talking to him downstairs, telling him all that she had in that neat and perfect kitchen, had been the most difficult thing in the world for her to do. There must have been times, he thought, when she had longed to throw it all in my face, like a fist. But this had not been one of those times.

“I believe her,” he said.

“What I don’t understand, where did she get her hands on these drugs? It sounds as if she only has to walk in somewhere off the street and there it is. LSD. Whatever you said it was called.”

“Ecstasy.”

“What?”

“The particular drug Kate’s been taking. Been buying. It’s called Ecstasy. Apparently, the group she goes around with, it’s pretty prevalent. The done thing.”

“But where …?”

“Where not? The clubs she goes, some of them. Coaches off to Sheffield, Manchester. Something to keep them going, keep them awake.”

“And that’s why she was stealing?”

Skelton nodded. “She could hardly come and ask us for an increase in her pocket money, could she?”

“Jack.”

“I know.”

It was hard for them to look at one another; Skelton touched his wife’s arm again; held, for little more than a moment, her hand.

“You’re cold,” he said.

“What will happen?” she said.

Skelton didn’t know. He couldn’t be certain what would happen about the stealing, and anyway, that was the least of it. What he didn’t know about was addiction, how possible or difficult it would be for her to stop, always supposing that was what she wanted. And other things. No matter what he had said to his wife, Skelton couldn’t wipe his mind free of AIDS. All right, so she was unlikely to have caught it from using a dirty needle. But that didn’t rule out other ways. No matter how hard he tried to close off his mind to those, it wasn’t yet possible.

Kate.

“They’ll crucify you, won’t they?” his wife said, standing close beside where he was sitting on the edge of their bed. “Not just the local ones. All of them. They’ll love it.”

Skelton leaned his head against her hip. “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s not important, what anyone says about me.” Wanting to mean it: knowing that it wasn’t true.