14

‘LOOK!’ RUBY SAID triumphantly from the triangle behind the sofa.

‘What’s that?’ said Daddy.

‘The back off the remote control.’

Ruby clambered over the back of the sofa with the bit of plastic and the glove.

‘Clever you,’ said Daddy.

Daddy fixed the remote and pressed Play on True Grit and for a bit they watched a one-eyed fat man help a little girl find the killers of her father.

Ruby over-laughed in all the good places, but Daddy didn’t. He toyed with the glove and tried it on, but it was too big for him.

‘This was behind the sofa?’ he said.

‘Uh-huh. There’s a pen lid too. Shall I get it?’

‘No,’ said Daddy. ‘Leave it.’

Ruby snuggled up under his arm, but Daddy was restless. In the middle of the shoot-out, he made her stand up so he could move the sofa to look for the other glove.

It wasn’t there.

He stood for a moment, staring down at the carpet, then looked at the door and said, ‘Back soon.’

‘How long is soon?’

‘Not long,’ he said. ‘Be a good girl.’

He closed the door behind him and Ruby heard him picking up his fishing gear from the porch. She switched off the TV by pressing the remote-control button as hard as she could.

She’d been a good girl and it hadn’t worked.

So she went upstairs and messed with Daddy’s cowboy things.

The cowboy drawer always swelled in the damp, and Ruby got red and sweaty in the wrestle.

Once she’d got it open far enough to reach inside, she put the gunbelt on first, hitching it all the way round to the final hole, which was small and stiff. It was too big for her, but not too too big, and if she spread her legs a bit, it would stay on her hips. The holster hung to her knee.

Then the hat.

She lifted out the black Stetson and placed it on her own head like a crown.

The Jingle Bobs were complicated. She couldn’t work them out. She spun the little wheels to make them ring, and decided she’d try them on another time.

Holding the gunbelt up all the way with a casual hand, Ruby waddled splay-legged the few paces to the mirror on the back of the door.

She looked exactly like a cowboy. Her bunny slippers spoiled it a bit, so Ruby chose not to look at them.

Her right hand fell naturally to the holster and she felt a jag of disappointment that there was no gun to play with. Sticks were just fine until there was something real to measure them by. In this holster they would have been just sticks. A real holster needed a real gun.

Ruby drew her finger at the mirror. ‘Pow! Pow-pow!’

The hat fell over her eyes with the recoil.

Ruby pushed it back, then tried to catch sight of herself while she wasn’t looking, so she could see how she really looked.

Still amazing.

The tip of the fishing rod dipped and danced, but John Trick didn’t see it. He saw past it – across the pale-grey sea to the vague hump of Lundy Island on the fuzzy horizon, and beyond that to a more distant place, while the crabs made merry with his bait…

As a child, John had rarely gone to primary school, where he’d been relentlessly teased about the scars on his face. And when he had gone, he’d learned to lash out first and let the other kids ask questions afterwards – if they still had teeth that weren’t a-wobble in their heads.

But then – on his first day at big school – he had seen Alison Jewell.

She had hit him like measles.

He hadn’t stopped fighting, but he had gone to school every possible day for the next four years just to see her – just to occupy the same space. Now and then, he and the other boys would shout inappropriate things at her in a bid to make contact, but he never had the courage to say anything real, because she came from Clovelly, and he’d heard that her mother was a doctor.

Her mother!

Even though he’d barely spoken to Alison in all the time they shared a classroom, just enough of that unexpected schooling rubbed off on John Trick that by the time he left he was taken on as an apprentice welder at the shipyard.

John remembered the early mornings when he got up in the dark and felt like a man. Riding his scooter through the lanes, the indicator clicking loudly in the night, to join the other men. They’d start with nothing but their hands and a plan and they’d build a ship. Every day they welded and moulded and fabricated their own lives; their own pride; their own futures. They talked and they shouted above the noise and they told dirty jokes and laughed whether they were funny or not. They arrived together and they left together, bonded by clocks and hard labour.

With his first pay packet he’d got just drunk enough that he’d caught a bus to Clovelly, banged on doors until he’d found Alison Jewell’s home, and asked her to marry him.

She’d laughed.

‘I didn’t even know you liked me,’ she’d said.

‘I don’t like you,’ he’d told her. ‘I love you.’

Alison had frowned – as if she couldn’t understand how someone who looked like him could ever love someone who looked like her – and so he’d leaned in and kissed her with tongues, and then pushed her down on to her bed under her Take That poster. Her parents were downstairs, so she’d tried to shove him off, but she hadn’t tried that hard, and he wasn’t so drunk that they couldn’t seal the deal.

Happy days.

He’d wanted to tell the whole world, but Alison said it was more fun if they kept it a secret, and was careful not to let on at school or anywhere else. She’d barely even let him see her, let alone have sex again – that’s how much fun she thought their secret would be – but they couldn’t keep it a secret for ever.

Ruby had seen to that.

At first John couldn’t believe his bad luck. Getting Ali pregnant on their very first time! But, as it turned out, a baby on the way was like a proof of purchase for a girl he would otherwise never have been able to afford.

Alison’s father had hit the roof. Gone through the roof. He’d actually cried. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so insulting. And the more pissed off Malcolm Jewell got, the more obstinate he’d become. Mr Jewell had demanded an abortion – what he called ‘Taking care of it so we can all get back to normal’ – but Alison had refused point blank. Even John had been surprised by how vehement she’d been about wanting to marry him – and moved by how much she loved him.

For the first time in his life, he’d felt he had the upper hand. Alison was his now. She was having his baby and he would call the shots – and if that meant a register office and a suit from Oxfam, then so be it. Her father could rage and her hoity-toity mother could cry and moan all she liked, but John had taken pleasure in telling them both that he was not one for charity.

‘It’s not about charity,’ Rosemary Jewell had said in her squeaky, sneaky, pop-eyed way. ‘It’s about tradition.’

John Trick snorted and snapped open another can. Tradition, bollocks; it was about possession.

Nine-tenths of the law.

They’d married in Barnstaple register office, with Alison in a plain blue dress and her mother sobbing throughout. He hadn’t even told his mother. She’d made her own choice years before, and it wasn’t him.

When he’d kissed the bride, she’d cried and whispered into his mouth, ‘Thank you.’

It seemed a long, long time ago, and lately, even nine-tenths didn’t feel like enough.

In the slow drizzle of the beach, John stared into the shimmering gold of his cider and thought about possession. Possessions were difficult things. Other people liked them too, and would take them from you if they could.

Alison’s parents would like to take her from him, for starters. They still thought she was too good for him. He tried only to see them at Christmas, but he could tell that was true in Malcolm’s stiff handshake and the way Rosemary touched his good cheek with hers – dry and distant despite the contact. They gave Ali money in secret – he knew that. Not just for her birthday and Christmas, but at other times too. She tried to hide it from him, but he had eyes. He’d found the receipt for the groceries they could not afford; noticed the new jeans Ruby was wearing before her old ones had even gone through at the knees. They were trying to buy Alison back, to control her with money, to loosen his hold. They must have thought they had a shot at it, ever since he’d lost his job.

As if losing his job had made him less entitled to his own wife.

And they tried to buy Ruby too, even though she was more his than anything had ever been. Last birthday they’d bought her a bicycle – pink, tassled, and the silliest gift you could buy for a child who lived squeezed between a hill and a cliff. Malcolm Jewell had spent hours puffing up and down the hill behind Ruby, holding on to the saddle, and with his face as red as his thinning hair. Ruby never rode the bicycle now, John was pleased to note, but buying it had been disrespectful to him.

And the worst of it was, Alison let them disrespect him and then lied to him about it. He could always tell – the way she tucked her hair behind her ear.

And now something strange was going on too. Something to do with the big glove, and those new shoes that were too high for either of them.

Alison lied to him about money. Now – for the first time ever – he wondered what else his wife might lie about.

And he wondered who the shoes might really be from.

Or for.

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