Part 4 (1/2)

'I don't even want to think what they're going through.'

'Exactly. Another good reason not to have children. Someone should have read them the warnings on the pack before they got into the procreation thing.'

Ben stopped slos.h.i.+ng his wine and raised his eyes to her. 'Another good reason not to have children? Is that what you said?'

'Yes. Why?'

'Sounds a bit flippant.'

She shrugged. 'Not flippant rational. I just don't see why people do it. When you look around yourself at the world see how overcrowded it is and then you see people having to go through what the Woods are going through, I mean, why do it?'

'But you don't not have children because you're afraid of losing them. That's crazy.'

Zoe stared at him, a little pulse beating at the back of her head, irrationally annoyed by that comment. He'd made it sound pitying. As if not wanting children meant she was ill, or defective. 'Crazy or not, you won't ever catch me with a football up my sweater.'

Ben gave her a long, puzzled look. A car went by on the street outside and a cloud covered the moon. After a while he stood. He put a hand on her shoulder. 'I think I'll go to bed now. Got a big day tomorrow.'

She raised her chin, surprised by his tone. His hand on her shoulder was friendly, but it wasn't the touch of a lover. 'OK,' she said uncertainly. 'I won't disturb you when I come up.'

He left the room and she sat for a long time, gazing at the place on the stairs his feet had disappeared, wondering what on earth she'd said. Wondering if the natural evolution of her life was always going to be the same always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Sally had always been the baby of the family. Dolly Daydream. Wide blue eyes and blonde ringlets. Everyone's favourite and completely lost now that the family was gone and there was no one left to look after her. Once, she'd been close to her parents, but with the divorce something had changed. Maybe it was embarra.s.sment, shame, a deep sense that she'd let them down somehow, but she'd found herself making excuses not to visit them in Spain, and slowly, over the months, their contact had dwindled to a phone call a week sometimes Millie would answer and speak to them and Sally wouldn't even know about it until later. As for Zoe ... well, Zoe was never going to come into the equation. She was something high up in the police now, and wouldn't want anything to do with Sally the spoiled, idiot doll, propped up in the corner with her vacant grin, always looking in the wrong direction and missing what was important in life.

Missing things like Melissa, happening right under her nose.

Big, tanned, leggy Melissa, with her fat frizz of blonde hair, her tennis player's shoulders and loud Australian accent. She'd crept into their lives through those fatal gaps in Sally's attention and, before anyone could draw breath, she was the next Mrs Julian Ca.s.sidy, starting a whole new chapter of Ca.s.sidys. According to Millie, the baby, Adelayde, had taken over the house at Sion Road with her playpens and bouncy chairs in every doorway. Melissa had dug up the lawn and replaced it with gravel-filled beds, huge desert plants and walkways for Adelayde. Sally didn't mind, though. She had decided there was only one way to approach the divorce amiably. To accept it and welcome it as a new start. She didn't miss Sion Road. The house seemed, in her memory, to be murky and distant, always cloaked in cloud or orange electric light. And anyway, she told herself, Peppercorn Cottage was beautiful, with its views and clear, natural light that just fell out of the sky and landed flat on the house and garden.

Peppercorn was hers. The terms of the divorce were that Julian would pay Millie's school fees until she was eighteen and buy the cottage for her and Sally to live in. The solicitor said Sally could have got more, but she didn't like the thought of clawing for things. It just seemed wrong. Julian had set up a special kind of mortgage on Peppercorn. Called an offset, he explained, it meant she could borrow against the house should she need to. Sally didn't understand the nuts and bolts of it, but she did grasp that Peppercorn was acting as a kind of a cus.h.i.+on for her. She and Millie had moved out of Sion Road one November weekend, carrying their suitcases and boxes of art equipment through drifts of fallen leaves and into Peppercorn. They'd turned the heating up high and bought boxes of pastries from the deli on George Street for the removals men. Sally hadn't given a thought to the overdraft she kept dipping into. Not until the following year, when the warning letters from the bank began to fall on the doormat.

'What on earth have you spent it all on? Just because the overdraft is there it doesn't mean you've got to use it. They'll take Peppercorn away from you if you're not careful.'

That winter, Julian had met her in a coffee shop on George Street. It was sleeting outside and the floor in the cafe was soaking from all the people who'd come off the street and dropped snow on it. Julian and Sally had sat at the back of the shop so Melissa couldn't walk by and catch sight of them.

'I don't know anyone who could go through that much money in a year. Honestly, Sally, what have you been doing?'

'I don't know,' she said lamely, completely at a loss. 'Truly I don't.'

'Well, I bet it hasn't gone on maintaining the house. That thatch'll need redoing before next winter. Buying things for people, I suppose. You're like a child when it comes to giving presents.'

Sally put her fingers on her temples and concentrated on not crying. It was probably true. She didn't like to turn up at someone's house without something for them. Probably it came from when she was a little girl. From the time she'd do anything to make Zoe smile. Anything at all. She'd save up her pocket money and, instead of spending it on herself, she'd wait until she overheard Zoe talking about something she wanted in one of Bath's shops, then sneak out and buy it. Zoe never seemed to know what to do with the gift. She'd stand with it in her hand and look at it awkwardly, as if she suspected it might explode in her face. As if she didn't quite know what expression to arrange her features into. Sally wished she could talk to her sister now. She wished there wasn't this awful cold distance between them.

'I've never had to think about money,' she told Julian now. 'You always took care of it. It's not a very good excuse, I know. And you're right the thatch has got a hole in it. Something about course fixings. There are squirrels and rats in it, looking for food. Someone's told me it's going to be ten thousand to fix.'

Julian sighed. 'I can't keep propping you up, Sally. I'm under a lot of pressure at work and things are very fraught at home with the baby not far away. Melissa's finding it hard not to get tense about money. She wouldn't be happy at all to hear I was helping you still.' He screwed up his napkin and felt in his pocket for his wallet. It was a new leather affair with his initials embossed in gold. From it he flipped out a cheque book. 'Two thousand pounds.' He began scribbling. 'After that my hands are tied. You'll have to find other ways of supporting yourself.'

If a change in life could be marked with a point in time, the way a signpost marks a fork in the road, or an island divides a river, Sally looked back at her life and saw two markers: the first, when, during a childhood squabble with Zoe, Sally had fallen off a bed on her hand, an event their parents had treated with unexpected seriousness, behaving suddenly as if an unspeakable darkness had descended on the family, and, the second, that day with Julian the day when she had, at last, grown up. Sitting hunched over her cup of hot chocolate, her feet wet and cold, her propped-up umbrella leaking a pitiful puddle on the floor, she saw the world in its plainest colours. Saw it was serious. It was real. The divorce was real and the overdraft was real. There really existed things like bankruptcy and repossessed houses and children living on sink estates. They didn't happen Out There. They happened In Here. In her life.

The six months that had followed were some of the hardest of her life. She got herself a job, she traded in her car for a smaller Ford Ka, she learned how to work out interest rates and how to write letters to banks. She heated only the kitchen and Millie's bedroom all winter, and never used the tumble-drier. There always seemed to be bird dirt on at least one of Millie's school s.h.i.+rts when it came in from the line that, or when it was really cold, frost making the clothes as stiff as boards. But she persevered. It was an uphill struggle and even now it was like running to keep still. She didn't turn to her parents for help they'd have been devastated to know the state she was in and, besides, it would get back to Zoe eventually. Zoe would never have got herself into a predicament like this. Zoe had always been the clever one. Amazing. She'd never have ended up accepting jobs from people like David Goldrab. She'd judo-kick him over the nearest hedge before she did that.

Still, it had to be done, she thought, as she got up the morning after Lorne had been found, and padded barefoot into the kitchen to make breakfast. There weren't any choices in this new world of hers. She switched on the kettle, set a pan of milk on the hob, arranged cups and plates on the table. Steve was still asleep so she didn't put the radio on. Anyway, it would all be about Lorne Wood and she didn't know if she could face listening to any more of that. She put some croissants into the oven. The tarot cards were still sitting in an untidy pile on the table where she'd dumped them last night. Now she paused and studied the one of Millie. It wasn't that the paint was fading, she saw. It was that something corrosive had blistered the surface, worming and chewing at Millie's face. Feeling suddenly cold, she raised her eyes and looked out of the window at the fields that strained limitlessly to the bottom of the sky. The ca.n.a.l where Lorne had died was miles away. Miles and miles and miles.

You don't believe in stuff like that, do you?

Of course not.

She turned the card face down and went to switch on the kettle. Millie was safe. She was fifteen. She knew how to look after herself. And, anyway, sooner or later you had to learn to take a step back.

10.

On the other side of town, in her living room, Zoe stood with a cup of coffee in her hand and studied the photos on her wall. Most of them came from the trip she'd taken eighteen years ago. Just her and the bike. She'd been everywhere. Mongolia, Australia, China, Egypt, South America. Getting the money together for the adventure had been one of the toughest things she'd ever done it had just about ripped the skin from her back. Had taken her places, made her do things she never wanted to think about again. But the trip itself turned out to be the most important time in her life. It had taught her all she knew about self-sufficiency, survival, determination. It had sprung her from the trap she'd lived in since childhood.

Lorne Wood would never have the chance to learn any of those things, she thought now, as the sun powered into her kitchen through the bay windows. That was a whole chapter of Lorne's life that would never be opened.

She put down the coffee and wandered around the room, opening cupboards and drawers until she found a tube of Slazenger tennis b.a.l.l.s. They'd been there for two or three summers, since she'd got it into her head she was going to beat every woman in the constabulary tennis club at Portishead. She'd done it within six months. Then she turned her attention to the men. But none of the men would play with her after that, so she'd got bored and dropped it.

Ben was still in bed, still asleep. Zoe sat on the sofa arm with her back to the stairs and popped open the tin. The b.a.l.l.s smelt of rubber and old summer gra.s.s. She tipped one out and bounced it once on the floor, then blew on it to clean off the fluff and grit. She rubbed it on her sleeve, opened her mouth wide, and pushed the ball in as far as it would go.

It went in surprisingly easily, lodging at its widest point between her teeth half in, half out of her mouth. The dry, chemical-tasting nap pushed her tongue to the back of her mouth, kicking in the gag reflex. The impulse was to rip the ball out she really believed she could hear the gristle in her jaw joint popping but she dug her fingers into the arm of the sofa, closed her eyes and tried to breathe through it, forcing herself to picture the ball being taped into her mouth. Her body shook, sweat popped under her arms, little black and white stars burst against her retinas. And then, when she thought the skin at the edges of her mouth would split open, like Lorne's had, she tugged the ball out and let it tumble to the floor, taking with it thick bands of saliva.

She sat back against the sofa, shaking, sucking in breath after breath, while on the floor the ball bounced and bounced. It hit the curtains and came to a juddering halt.

11.

'Hey. I found you.' Steve stood in the kitchen doorway. He was naked, rubbing his eyes and stretching his arms above his head. 'G.o.d, I slept well. I love it here.'

'Sit down.' Sally got an elastic band out of a drawer, bound Millie's card to the outside of the pack and pushed it into the back of one of the drawers. She turned to check the milk that was heating on the stove. 'I've got to get going. Got to be at work at nine.'

'No time for hanky-panky, then?'

'I've got to be at work.'

He smiled and stretched some more. His hands found the low ceiling and he used it to press himself down, bending his knees, lengthening his body and cracking the sleep out of his muscles. He was different in every way from Julian, who had been pale and hairless with soft arms and womanly hips. Steve was big, with dark hair and a solid, suntanned neck. His legs were hard and hairy, like a centaur's. Looking at him now, stretching, was like watching one of Leonardo da Vinci's anatomy studies come to life.

She stood at the hob, whisking the milk into froth, shooting him surrept.i.tious looks as he wandered around, yawning and checking inside the fridge. It had been four months since they'd got together and she still couldn't quite believe he was here. Steve had given her s.e.x on the brain: if she had even half an hour between cleaning jobs, she'd scurry over to his house and they'd end up naked on the kitchen floor. Or on the stairs, halfway up to the bedroom. It was totally different from being with Julian. Maybe she was having a mid-life crisis. At thirty-five.

Steve was in 'corporate espionage'. Sally wasn't entirely sure what that meant but he always seemed to be dealing with people who lived in remote and glamorous places. His address book, which she'd seen lying open at his house one day, was crammed with addresses in countries like the Emirates, Liberia and South Africa, and more than once he'd had to set his alarm for the middle of the night so he could get up and take a conference call with someone in Peru or Bolivia. He wore a suit when he left the house in the morning, but in her imagination he wore a black polo-neck and jeans and had secret knives fitted in his soles. She had no idea why he wanted to be with someone as stupid as she was. Maybe it was because she was so easy. He only had to look at her and she'd roll backwards on to the bed, her legs open, a blank, grateful smile on her face.

'So.' He linked his fingers and cracked the knuckles. Rolled his head. 'Where're you working today?'

'North.'