The Night Ferry

9

I don’t normally notice people when I run. I shut out the world, floating over the ground like a vague impression. Today is different. I can hear people talking, arguing and laughing. There are muffled footsteps and car doors closing, the hum of traffic and machines.

“New Boy” Dave is at the hospital with Ruiz. That’s where I’m heading, although the strangeness of the city makes it difficult to get my bearings. There are twin church steeples ahead of me. I turn again, running past flat-fronted shops with barred windows or metal shutters. Some of the alleys and lanes are only wide enough for bicycles or pedestrians.

By the time I find the hospital it is almost dark. The corridors are quiet and rain streaks the windows. “New Boy” Dave puts his jacket around my shoulders to stop me from getting cold. Ruiz is asleep.

“How is he?”

“Bored shitless. Today he tried to organize a mass escape from the hospital to the nearest pub. He convinced two guys to join him—both amputees. He said they were legless already so it shouldn’t matter.”

“How far did they get?”

“As far as the hospital gift shop. One of the nurses uncovered the escape plot and called security.”

“What did the DI say?”

“He said the Resistance would spring him tomorrow.”

Dave has been talking to the doctors. Ruiz should be able to leave hospital in a few days but he won’t be able to fly for a month.

“We can take the ferry,” I suggest.

Dave is toying with my fingers, running his thumb across the palm. “I was sort of hoping you might fly home with me tomorrow. I have an Old Bailey trial on Monday.”

“I can’t leave the DI. We started this together.”

He understands. “What are you going to do about the job?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“You’re supposed to have started.”

“I know.”

There’s something else he wants to ask. His forehead creases, wrestling with the question.

“Have you thought about the other thing?” he asks. He’s referring to the sailing school and the cottage by the sea. Marriage. The future. I’m still amazed that he plucked up the courage to ask me. The sense of expectation and dread must be killing him. Sometimes life is like the movies, with the audience barracking, “Just ask her. Just ask her.”

“I thought you always wanted to be a detective,” I say.

“I wanted to be a fireman when I was six. I got over it.”

“I fell in love with Mr. Sayer, my piano teacher, and wanted to be a concert pianist.”

“I didn’t know you played.”

“It’s still open to debate.”

He’s waiting for my answer.

“So what happened, Dave? What made you decide to quit?”

He shrugs.

“Something must have triggered it.”

“You remember Jack Lonsdale?”

“I heard he got wounded.”

Dave silences his hands by putting them in his pockets. “We were following up a tip-off about a bail jumper on the White City Estate. A drug dealer. It’s a god-awful place at the best of times but this was Saturday night in mid-July. Hot. We found the place okay and knocked on the door. It was supposed to be a simple pickup. I was putting handcuffs on the dealer when his fifteen-year-old kid came out of the kitchen and stuck a knife in Jack’s chest. Right there.” He points to the spot. “The kid was hanging off the blade trying to scramble his guts, but I managed to pry him loose. His eyes were like saucers. He was higher than a 747. I tried to get Jack out to the car but there were two hundred people outside the flat, most of them West Indian, screaming abuse and throwing shit. I thought we were gonna die.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You had your own shit to deal with.”

“How’s Jack now?”

“They had to take out part of his bowel and he’s taken early retirement. The dealer finished up in Brixton. His kid went to a foster home. His mother was dead, I think.”

Dave lowers his eyes, unwilling to look at me. “I know it makes me sound like a coward but I keep thinking how it could have been me spilling blood on that filthy floor—or worse, it could have been you.”

“It doesn’t make you a coward. It makes you human.”

“Yeah, well, that’s when I got to thinking about doing something else.”

“Maybe you just need a sea change.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe you don’t really want to marry me.”

“Yes I do.”

“Would you still want to marry me if we didn’t have children?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m asking.”

“But you want children, right?”

“What if I couldn’t have children?”

Dave straightens up. He doesn’t understand.

I try to explain. “Sometimes children just don’t arrive. Look at Cate. She couldn’t get pregnant and it twisted her up inside until she did something foolish. Don’t you think if two people love each other that should be enough?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

He still doesn’t get my point. There is nowhere else for me to go except the truth. Words tumble out and I’m surprised at how organized they sound. Almost perfect sentences.

A woman’s pelvis is meant to expand and tilt forward as a baby grows inside her. Mine can’t do this. I have metal plates and rods holding my spine together. My pelvis cannot bend or twist. Pregnancy would put enormous strain on the disks and joints of my lower back. I risk being paralyzed and nursing a baby from a wheelchair.

He looks stunned. Desolate. It doesn’t matter what he says now because I have glimpsed his soul. He wants to raise a child. And for the first time in my life, I realize that I want one too. I want to be a mother.

In the hours that follow all possibilities are considered. On the taxi ride to the hotel, over dinner, afterward in bed, Dave talks of second opinions, alternatives and operations. We use up so much air in the room that I can scarcely breathe. He hasn’t answered my original question. The most important one. He hasn’t said if it matters.

While on the subject of true confessions, I tell him about sleeping with Barnaby Elliot and falling out with Cate. There are moments when I see him flinch but he needs to hear this. I am not the person he imagines.

My mother says the truth is unimportant when it comes to love. An arranged marriage is all about the fictions that one family tells another. Perhaps she’s right. Perhaps falling in love is about inventing a story and accepting the truth of it.