Every Woman Knows A Secret
BY ROSIE THOMAS

Contents

Title Page

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Rosie Thomas

Copyright

About the Publisher

One

Yesterday is gone for ever. And once each day is gone, it can only be seen through the one-way mirror of what has happened between then and now. In this way, every minute of every day that passes is a kind of bereavement.

Jess Arrowsmith was not thinking about any of this, not yet.

She was used to keeping her mind narrowly fixed on her work, and on this early winter’s morning she was busy with plants and pots and compost. If her thinking strayed beyond them it was only to the comfortable prospect of hot coffee, and a fifteen-minute sit-down with the newspaper, the small rewards for one job properly completed before she had to begin the next.

It was a cold day but the big greenhouse was pleasantly warm; the ridges and valleys of glass overhead were faintly misted so the bone-whiteness of the sky above was softened. Jess worked steadily, without looking up, amongst scents that she loved but knew too well to distinguish separately: moist peat, washed gravel, the sharp tang of a crushed leaf. There was the steady drip of water, and the sound of another gardener tramping between the benches of a different aisle, hidden by a screen of leaves.

She took a new tray of plantlets from the waiting row and squared it in front of her. Tenderly she lifted a plantlet from the tray, holding one sturdy seed leaf and easing the stem and tiny root filaments free of the crumbs of earth. She tucked the little plant into a three-inch pot and firmed the fresh compost around the stem once more, then added a label. A new pelargonium, worth one pound twenty-five on the nursery by the end of May, although naturally not to Jess directly. She was only an employee. But she did not think of this either; the work was simply there, waiting to be done.

She moved steadily, smoothly lifting and settling plant after plant, until the seed trays were emptied. Then she straightened the rows of filled pots, checked the labels, and carried the trays to the trough at the end of the aisle. She scrubbed them out in freezing water and left them methodically stacked to dry.

At last she stood upright, easing her bent back with the heels of her hands. She wiped her palms on the backside of her dungarees and sighed in relief and satisfaction as she pushed a hank of hair out of her eyes.

The staff rest-room across the yard was empty. Jess left her boots outside the door and boiled water to make instant coffee, warming her icy fingers on the mug. She sat down in a sagging armchair and idly picked up a women’s magazine that someone had left on the next chair. A beauty article was illustrated with photographs of hands, smooth and creamy and tipped with perfect scarlet and plum-red nails. On the glossy page Jess splayed her own hand, skin cracked and seamed with dirt, and laughed aloud.

‘Someone’s happy, then. Nice to hear, in this place.’

The woman who had come in was older than Jess, in her fifties. She was plump, dressed in a blue nylon overall.

Jess looked up at her. ‘Am I? Is it? Joyce, you’re late today.’

Joyce produced her own tea, sugar and powdered milk from her locker and locked it securely again.

‘It’s been bloody murder in the shop all morning. And that Tony’s never there when you want him, for fetching and carrying. I can’t lift no heavy stuff. I get enough of that at home.’

Joyce rattled with the kettle and her special cup and saucer, exuding weary displeasure. Jess had worked with her for three years. She knew why Joyce was tired and irritable.

‘How’s your mum?’ she asked.

‘About the same. No, not the same, she couldn’t be, could she? Every day she gets a bit worse, loses a bit more of herself. Well, I lose a bit more of her really, because she doesn’t know what’s happening, does she? She can’t feed herself any more. Has to have her mush spooned into her mouth.’

Jess listened, nodding, letting her talk because it was all she could offer. She couldn’t relieve Joyce of the pity or the responsibility for her senile mother. When her fifteen-minute break was over she stood up and briefly put her arm round Joyce’s shoulders, feeling the solid flesh insulated by woollens and the slither of nylon.

‘I’d better get back to it.’

Joyce sniffed. ‘You’re a good girl. Really, you are. These things are sent to try us, aren’t they?’

Outside, the cold air pinched Jess’s face and fingers but she breathed it in, squaring herself to the weather as she pulled on her coat. She went to check stock plants on the open rows at the back of the nursery.

In Jess’s home town of Ditchley, a dozen miles from the nursery, two boys arrived at a side-street gym. The road outside was busy with cars and delivery vans making their way around the pedestrianised main street, and the chain stores in the precinct were busy with early lunch-time custom, but there was only a handful of people in the gym. The boys pushed their way into the locker room, confident to the point of arrogance, and changed into sweatpants with vests cut to bare their shoulders, and broad leather weight-lifters’ belts. In the gym they stood in front of the mirrors waiting for a fresh loop of music to come pounding out of the overhead speakers, then began their workout. After a few minutes they were both slick with sweat and grinning with the high of their exertions.

The older one said, ‘Right then, Dan. Alternate curls and kickbacks.’

Dan was nineteen, the younger by three years. He was dark and good-looking, although thinner and less muscled than his friend. He rattled a pair of dumbbells from the rack in front of the mirrors and weighed them in his hands. Then he began to work again, curling up and relaxing each arm in turn, fists clenched around the weights. The muscles of his upper arm tightened and the cords stood out in his neck. His lips pulled back in a painful grimace that bared his teeth and he began to grunt softly with the effort of hauling fist to shoulder.

His friend watched. ‘Nine, ten, Danny boy. Eleven, twelve. Three more, go.’ He was grinning again, circling him, taunting as well as encouraging. Danny finished the set with a gasp of triumph and let the weights drop.

‘Shit, Rob.’

‘Kickbacks now.’ Rob would not let him rest between repetitions, and Danny did not want to seem to need a respite. He picked up another dumbbell at once and bent from the waist. One-handed and with a stiff wrist he swung the weight up behind him and back like a piston. Down and up. His breath hissed as he counted the repetitions. At fifteen he changed hands and repeated the set. ‘Yeah. Fuck,’ he groaned. He clanged the weight back on to the rack and dropped on to a bench, wiping his forehead with the inside of his wrist.

Rob picked a heavier pair of weights and squared himself to the mirror. His hair was long, shoulder length with a mass of coppery and bronze coils loosely tied with a piece of cord. He tossed it back with a jerk of his head as his arms curled taut, the triceps bulging. He made the weights look momentarily weightless.

Danny watched, openly admiring. At the changeover Rob smiled sidelong at him.

‘See how it’s done?’

‘Yeah, right, Arnie.’

Rob mimed a punch and Danny parried it, snorting with laughter. They scuffled for a minute, with an edge of real threat between them only just submerged. The music pounded on and one of the other men in the gym briefly glanced up from his exertions.

‘C’mon. Bench press now,’ Rob ordered.

Shoulder to shoulder Danny and Rob strode down the gym to where the big barbells were racked in sullen pyramids. Looking in the mirror behind Rob’s back, Danny rotated each shoulder in turn, easing the protesting muscles.

When the boys emerged into the daylight after their workout, it was early in the afternoon. Young women were clicking back to work from their lunch hour and the bins outside McDonald’s were heaped with litter. Danny stood with his sports bag slung over one shoulder, challengingly watching a pair of girls go by. His black hair was wet, slicked flat from the shower. One of the pair glanced back at him over her shoulder, half smiling a sly invitation.

‘Coming for a pint?’ Rob asked. Danny nodded and turned his back on the girl.

Rob’s hair took on a metallic glitter from the window lights of an electrical goods shop. His handsome face was sharpened by a thin nose and a long-lipped mouth curved like a woman’s. He led the way through the bunches of shoppers, his shoulders broad in a scuffed leather jacket, his gym bag loosely held in one hand.

The pub was warm and steamy with the smell of beer and cigarette smoke. A television flickered over the bar and through an archway a man in overalls leaned on a snooker cue while his opponent lined up a shot. Rob flipped a coin on to the cushion and turned to the bar. With their full pints the boys sat at a table and stretched out their long legs, commandeering the space, pleased with the afterglow of exercise and the soft space of the afternoon ahead of them.

‘You’re doing well,’ Rob said expansively. He folded his lower lip over the upper to erase the froth of beer. Danny checked his expression for mockery and decided that Rob was being straight.

‘Yeah, thanks. I feel good.’

‘You going to go on training?’

‘Oh, yeah. I should think. You know?’

Sitting in the bleary comfort of the pub, with worked muscles and a thirst and an afternoon and an evening to enjoy, Dan had a precise awareness of the pleasures of life. He remembered the girl outside the gym. Nice legs. And then he forgot her again, because he never had any problems with getting girls. Rob’s company was of a different order.

They had been at the same school, a tough, oversized comprehensive for boys, on the north side of the town, only a couple of miles from the pub where they were sitting. But the difference in their ages had meant that Rob had been too far ahead of Danny even to notice his existence. In those days, Rob had been a loner. He had been big and strong, but he had never bothered to involve himself with the football team or any other of the school sports that Danny hankered after. There was a self-containment and an aura of toughness about Rob Ellis that struck Danny as enviably cool.

And then, four months ago, after Danny had finished his A-levels and was idling away his time in a search for non-existent part-time work, he had seen Rob sitting in another pub. There was a toolbag at his feet and he was reading a paperback. Danny took the seat next to him, and when Rob failed to look up he asked him boldly if the book was good, since he seemed so absorbed in it. Rob glanced at him, without recognition, and flipped the book over so Danny could read the front cover. It was by Don DeLillo, a writer Danny had never heard of.

They had begun a desultory conversation and Rob agreed that he did remember Daniel Arrowsmith, just. After that they had met for a game of squash, then an evening’s drinking. They had become friends, but even though the odd folding and eliding of adult time had made them more or less contemporaries, Danny had an uneasy sense that they were not equals. He needed to match Rob’s achievements with his own. The murmured complaint of his shoulder and neck muscles was a reminder of it.

Dan took a long swallow of his beer. He was glad to be with Rob. The day was panning out fine.

The man in overalls passed in front of them.

‘You’re on.’ He jerked his thumb at the table.

‘Thanks, mate.’

Rob weighed a cue in his hand and massaged the tip of it with the chalk cube.

‘Have a couple of quid on it?’

With a reflex motion Danny patted the back pocket of his jeans where his wallet sat.

‘Sure.’

The pub emptied in the afternoon lull and there were no rival demands for the table. The racing flickered unwatched on the television while they played a competitive game, circling the table, standing with folded arms to watch one another’s breaks, not talking much.

Danny won. ‘Give you the best of three?’ he offered, and bought another two pints.

Out of three games, Danny won two. Unable to stop himself smiling, he pocketed Rob’s money.

‘You’ve been getting some practice in,’ Rob acknowledged. ‘And I thought you students were supposed to go to lectures and study and worry about your loans and your CVs all the time.’

‘It’s not all beer and sex and snooker, mate.’

‘Sounds like it is to me.’

This was not smooth ground. Rob had not achieved the necessary qualifications to go to university, even to the local polytechnic-turned-university where Danny was a student. He worked as a self-employed carpenter, building fitted kitchens if he was lucky and alcove shelves if he was not. It would not take much of a spark to fire an argument about the difference in their circumstances.

‘You want another pint?’ Danny asked, shrugging.

They had drunk three pints apiece and the afternoon had drifted away. Rob leaned against the wall with his arms stretched along the greasy dado rail. The bar was already filling again with little groups of day’s-end people who put briefcases on the floor and draped mackintoshes over the chairs. The haven was being invaded and he was in any case bored with it.

‘No. I could handle some food, though.’

Outside, the greenish remnants of daylight had been swallowed by the multicolours of shop windows and street lights. It was drizzling, and the black road was shining with wet and the red splinters of refracted tail-lights. The traffic had closed in and there was a thrum of idling engines at the traffic lights, and the compressed noise of lined-up in-car stereos. The boys hesitated, turning up the collars of their jackets and squinting in the rain. Most of the shops were closing but there was a café on the corner. Rob pointed and they ran to it.

At a table in a wood-partitioned booth they ordered a fry-up and chips. After a dozen mouthfuls Rob paused, his fork poised.

‘What do you fancy doing tonight?’ He looked sideways at Danny, across the narrow bridge of his nose. His eyes were elongated, greenish, expressing a challenge even when there was none.

Dan hesitated. ‘I ought to go back.’ He still lived at home. It was cheaper than digs and his grant didn’t go far.

‘Sure. Don’t want to be late and get into trouble, do you?’

They both laughed at the idea. Again, Danny had an expansive sense of the pleasures of life, lent a hazy and seductive glow by the beer he had drunk. The door opened with a gust of cold and rain, and a gang of girls came in.

There were four of them. They wore little belted coats, shiny and crackling, that peeled off to reveal short skirts and fuzzy knitted tops. They crowded together into the booth opposite the boys, clattering and giggling and banging their handbags on the table. One of them had long thin legs in thick black tights, and buckled ankle boots with high heels. Her long dark hair was beaded with rain and as she flicked it back she stared boldly under her fringe at Danny.

Within a few minutes the boys were squeezing into the booth with them.

‘D’you mind?’ one of the girls pouted. ‘This is a private celebration.’

‘We don’t object to a bit of privacy, Dan, do we?’

‘Not at all. What are you celebrating? We’ll help you out, if you want.’

The dark-haired one said, still looking at Dan, ‘It’s Zoe’s birthday.’

Rob clicked his fingers. ‘That’s no problem. It so happens that birthdays are our real speciality, and Zoe’s birthdays are what we do best of all. Waiter, bring flowers, ice, champagne.’

‘You’ve got a bit of a cheek,’ the plainest girl said, and one of the others laughed.

‘Champagne? In this place? Two teas one teabag, more like.’

‘We’re going to a club later,’ the dark one told Danny. The girls always gravitated towards him. He had an air of tender vulnerability, which Rob did not. Danny nodded seriously.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Cat.’

‘What sort of name’s that?’

‘Cat. For Catherine, you know.’

Jess was driving the twelve miles home from the nursery, along a route so familiar to her that all the features of it had been smoothed away. Ditchley was in the middle of England; it was neither southern nor northern, and whilst it was some distance from Birmingham or Sheffield or Nottingham, it was no longer just a country town. Jess had grown up there, and she had seen the surrounding countryside eaten up by new housing estates, and out-of-town shopping developments, and garden centres. The open fields had shrunk and had been hemmed in by roads, so it seemed now that she lived on an island triangle bounded by motorways. The town itself was prosaic and middling as it had always been, but the last years had smeared it with tacky modernity. It now appeared brave but increasingly discomfited under its pedestrian centre and multi-storey car park, like a middle-aged matron making an effort in an outfit too young for her.

Jess’s face tipped into a sudden wry smile. It wasn’t Ditchley that was middle-aged, but herself. Am I so dull? she wondered. To have spent so much of my life in one place, and to have ended up disappointed in it, as well as in myself?

Deliberately, to avoid the question, she turned her thoughts to Joyce. Joyce had gone home, as she did every night, to relieve her mother’s day nurse and to look after the old woman until the nurse came back again in the morning, setting Joyce free once more for her work in the shop. Jess’s sympathy for her colleague made her feel ashamed of her own trivial worries. She dismissed her anxiety about money, and the future, and the faint but persistent loneliness that lived inside her like a disease, and tried to be positive.

This was her good time of the day. For all its tedious familiarity the journey home was soothing. She liked the way the road unwound through a dark twist of fields towards the orange-rimmed straddle and loop of the motorway, and on to the choreographed knit and unravel of a pair of roundabouts and through tidy streets to the cul-de-sac where she lived.

Her house, when she reached it, was in darkness behind its unkempt hedge.

Jess let herself in, switching on the lights. She glanced at the brown envelopes thrown on the hallstand and passed on into the kitchen without picking them up. Automatically she brushed a scatter of crumbs off the table and dropped them in the sink, and put the butter dish back in the refrigerator. She opened the door of the freezer compartment and stared at the neat stack of ready-made meals, then slammed the door shut again so the rubber seal made its meaty reverse-kissing sound.

The living room was tidy, and warm because the central heating had clicked on an hour before. The room was green with plants, weeping-leaved Ficus and palms and pink and purple-starred Saintpaulias. Jess moved from one pot to the next, touching the soil under the thick leaves with the tips of her fingers. The telephone rang.

‘Darling, it’s me. How’s your day been?’

It was Jess’s sister Lizzie. Jess smiled, looping the cord of the telephone away from the receiver and sitting down in the armchair, her feet tucked beneath her.

Lizzie was in her own home, twelve miles away. The sisters always tried to talk to each other every day, even when the differences in their lives kept them apart. Once it was Jess who had made the calls, mothering and reassuring her more exotic sister; now it was Lizzie’s turn to ask the probing questions.

Lizzie slumped on her sofa, massaging her neck with her free hand and staring at the mess of toys on the carpet. There was a glob of baby food drying on her black jersey and she frowned, picking at it. She was the younger by four years. When Lizzie had been working as an actress, precariously balanced between waitressing jobs and the promise of making it big, Jess was already married and a mother. The home that Jess had made with Ian and their children had been a second home to Lizzie, whenever she had needed to crawl back to it after disappointment over a part or in love.

Now, their roles were reversed.

‘My day was pretty ordinary. Not bad. It’s rather nice in the greenhouses this time of year.’

Lizzie’s frown darkened. Jess needed to get a hold on her life.

‘All on your own, with soil and flowerpots and roots and muck?’

‘Compost. And that’s for outdoor work, you don’t bring it in the greenhouse. I like peace and quiet.’

‘Jess. I wish you’d get out of there.’

‘I’m all right where I am.’

Lizzie tried to muster enough energy to renew her campaign for brightening Jess’s life, but she felt too tired tonight. It had been a long day with a baby of twenty months. He was asleep now, pink and fragrant from his bath, and the delicious thought of him suddenly blotted out her concern for Jess.

As they talked, exchanging the small news of the day, Lizzie heard the sound of her husband’s key in the lock. When James came in she looked up, beaming, and mimed a lingering kiss. She mouthed ‘Jess’ in answer to his silent question, and James retreated. Lizzie knew that he was tiptoeing upstairs to lean over the cot and marvel at his baby son.

Lizzie was thinking, as she did a dozen times a day, that she couldn’t quite believe in so much happiness. Now aged thirty-nine, within the last two and a half years, she had at last met the right man, married him, and had a baby. And just at the time when all this was happening, Jess’s twenty-three-year-old marriage to Ian was acrimoniously ending.

‘If you say so. I can’t help thinking, you know.’

‘Liz. I know what you want. You want me to be happy and with someone and doing and feeling the same things as you. But our lives have always been completely different, why should they start to be the same now?’

‘I don’t want you to be alone.’

This was the dark spot in Lizzie’s brand-new, pin-bright happiness. If only Jess were not lonely. If only something would happen to her that would comfortably reflect Lizzie’s own good fortune. A spring of maternal tenderness had been tapped in Liz by the birth of her child, and the overflow of it washed around Jess.

‘Well, I’m not alone, am I? I’m lucky.’

Lizzie gathered her hair in one hand and artfully twisted it off her face, stretching her neck and posing as if for the camera.

‘Darling, you can’t live your life through him, it’s not healthy for either of you.’

Jess said evenly, so that they both recognised it as a warning-off, ‘I don’t live through him, or anyone else. I’ve been a wife and a mother for twenty-three years. Now I want to be just what I am.’

There was a moment’s awkward silence.

‘I’m sorry,’ Lizzie said.

Jess smiled into the mouthpiece. ‘For what? For being yourself?’ Briefly she became the comforter again; the balance between them tipped so easily. ‘How’s Sock? What’s he doing?’

Christened Thomas Alexander, Lizzie’s baby had been referred to in the womb as Socrates and was now invariably known as Sock.

Lizzie’s voice lightened. ‘Asleep at last, thank God. He’s been tireless today, a chaos machine.’

Sock was a source of delight to everyone. For Jess the sight and smell and feel of him, the round head and peachy fuzz of skin, brought back piercingly sharp memories of her own babies. She turned her head to look at their photographs, framed on the shelf beside her chair. To see Sock was almost to have them back again.

‘He’s learnt so many new words.’

‘What does he say?’

They could talk endlessly about his achievements. There were no complications in this.

‘James is looking after him for the whole day tomorrow. I’m going to London to do the handcream voice-over. I’m swimming in free handouts of the stuff here, do you want some?’

‘Handcream? Yes, can you take it intravenously?’

‘Probably. I just hope they don’t expect me to say so in thirty seconds. Darling, I’ve got to go.’

James reappeared, changed out of his business clothes into a sweater and corduroys. He made a little tilting movement with his fingers, asking if she wanted a drink. Lizzie mouthed, ‘God, yes.’

‘Right. Hope the voice-over goes well. Call me soon.’

‘Tomorrow night, or the day after. Promise you’re all right?’

‘Everything is fine here.’

‘Good night darling.’

James came to her as she put down the phone and slid his hands down to her hips, then kissed her thoroughly.

‘Mmm. At last. How are you, my darling?’

She curled an arm around his neck. ‘Feeling pretty fat and mumsy, actually.’

‘You look wonderful. You feel wonderful.’

‘Oh. Ah. Jim, what did my life consist of before there was you?’

Jess went slowly upstairs to the bathroom and tipped a heap of soiled clothes out of a basket. She stooped to sort them into differentiated piles and carried an armful down to the kitchen. She fed the bundle into the washing machine and slammed the round eye of the door, and while the clothes turned in the lace of suds she found a tin of soup in the cupboard and heated it up. She carried the bowl through into the living room and watched the television news as she ate.

The club was packed. It was a popular DJ night and there were surges of dancers filling the floor. In the mass of people Rob could see Danny dancing with Cat. He was smiling broadly and bouncing on the spot, up and down fast from the knees, as if he was on springs. One hand held a bottle by the neck and the other waved in the air over his head. The four girls and Rob and Danny had all had a lot to drink, the celebration of Zoe’s birthday moving on from the café to gather swift momentum in another pub and then the club. The beginning of the day seemed very long ago to Rob, at the far end of a multicoloured narrow tunnel. The music was loud, seeming to generate itself within his head. He followed the intricate cross-patterning of it in his mind, letting his eyes drift shut, then opening them again to see Cat standing in front of him. She was very pretty, he noticed for the first time. A little triangular face, just like a cat’s, with a damp fringe of hair sticking to her forehead. Smoky eyes. He knew from dancing with her that she was thin and light-boned. Catty-like. He swayed towards her with music booming in his head. She was saying something to him.

‘What?’

She repeated it, shouting with her mouth to his ear. Warm breath on his face. ‘Where’s Rachel?’

Rachel. Yes, the plain one of the foursome. She had been here a minute or perhaps an hour ago. He shrugged his shoulders against the waves of sound and Cat pushed away from him. Danny was at the bar now and Rob joined him. Another beer apiece, and when Danny tilted the bottle to his mouth a trail of silvery froth ran down his chin and glittered in the blue and purple lights. He wiped it away and moved his head to draw Rob closer. They stumbled together, Rob’s arm round Dan’s shoulders, a support for both of them.

‘Not a bad night.’ Dan was grinning, the angle of the lights making him seem cross-eyed.

‘Yeah, pretty good.’

‘Listen. I’m going back with her.’

‘With who?’

‘Cat.’

‘Shit. I quite fancied her myself.’

Danny’s grin widened. ‘No chance, my son. I’m in there.’

‘Who’s driving, then?’ Rob’s old van was parked outside. After the pub they had all piled into it, the girls’ legs and buttocks heaving and pressing in the passenger seat. Rob remembered laughing and gunning the clapped-out engine, and the traffic lights on sentry duty down a long stretch of wet road to the club warehouse.

‘We’ll get a cab or something,’ Dan said vaguely, his smile beatific, irritating.

‘Sod you then.’ A prickle of antagonism renewed itself between them.

‘What about what’s-her-name, Zoe?’

‘Thanks.’

Cat came back. She had pushed her hair off her face and her round forehead looked bare and vulnerable.

‘Rachel’s in the toilets. She’s not very well.’

Danny took another pull on his beer.

‘What’s happening then?’

‘We’re going to take her home.’

‘All of you? What is she, crippled?’

Cat hesitated. Her top lip crimped, making a new triangle in the inverted one of her face. ‘Wait a minute, then.’

There was beer spilt on the bar, and a slick of it underfoot. The crowd standing three deep was now dotted with familiar faces, and the sweating barman in his soaked T-shirt was a regular at the gym. The gathering seemed suddenly tribal and this and the women’s invisible crisis tipped the boys back into collusion. They turned their backs on the heaving dance floor and the barman saw them and sent two uncapped bottle slithering across. Dan clashed his against Rob’s and they drank, leaning their heads back. The blue and purple lights recoloured Rob’s sweat-darkened hair. Standing shoulder to shoulder while the surf of people and music crashed around them, they had almost forgotten Cat before she materialised again, with Zoe beside her.

‘The other two have gone.’

Danny took hold of her wrist, his feral grin showing his teeth. ‘C’mon then. We’ll drive you girls home.’

The rain had thinned into drizzle once more. In the front of the van Cat sat across Danny’s knees but her arm and shoulder and thigh were wedged against Rob. Zoe crouched in the space behind, her chin over Danny’s shoulder. They were not singing or laughing any longer. Rob peered ahead, frowning through the hypnotising arcs of the wipers. The cab of the van vibrated with engine noise, but on a different frequency each of them plainly heard the ambiguous whisper of sex.

Jess washed up her soup pan and placed her bowl and spoon in the proper slots in the dishwasher. In the hallway she glanced at the security chain for the front door hanging loose from its bolts. She checked her watch and hesitated for a minute as a dark wing of anxiety shadowed her thoughts. Then she went slowly upstairs, leaving the door unsecured. Her bedroom and the inviting bed were as she had left them. She sat on the edge of the bed and wearily reached down to undo her shoes.

Cat’s place was a rented room in a rambling mouldy-smelling house near the railway line. While Rob and Danny were waiting on the step for her to rummage for her keys they heard the muffled rumble of a goods train passing. Rob thought of heavy flasks of nuclear waste being transported from somewhere to somewhere in the midnight dark, and shivered as if a cold hand had been laid on him.

‘There isn’t much to drink. Some vodka I think, if you want that. Someone left it here.’

Cat produced a half-empty bottle from a partitioned sink cupboard.

‘I’ll have some,’ Rob said. They had begun laughing again. The two boys stumbling in the cluttered room seemed incongruous, comically out of scale. Zoe peered at her pale reflection in her handbag mirror and stretched her mouth ready to coat it with lipstick. Her hand slipped with the cylinder and slashed scarlet across her teeth instead. Her helpless giggle turned into a hiccup.

Cat gave each of them a green glass with an inch of vodka in it. Danny took his and immediately put it aside, losing it. Cat slid a tape into a cassette player and music blurted out, much too loud. She laughed and prodded at the controls, then collapsed backwards on the bed beside her friend.

Danny mumbled, ‘I’ll roll a spliff.’ He sat sideways at a tiny table and produced the pouch from his pocket, humming as he spread the papers.

Then they sat on the bed, one on either side of the girls, passing the clumsy roll-up between them. Cat’s black legs sprawled impartially. Danny touched the curve of her thigh with the tips of his fingers and began to stroke, lightly, then more insistently.

He drew in a breath and held it. Then, abruptly, he lurched to his feet.

The room was spinning around him but he didn’t care. There was a wash of light inside his head, golden light filled with stars that prickled within his brain in the way that not very long ago a certain type of sweets had been made to fizz on his tongue. It was impossible to contain this feeling of power, which was what the light was; he had to let it burst out. He could feel the wild breadth of his own smile. He was dry-mouthed and his gums squeaked against his teeth. He looked down at Cat to see her staring up at him, amazed. Zoe’s eyes were closed, her head lolling on Rob’s shoulder.

Danny flung out his arm. To his surprise, his fingers were still nipped on the roll-up. Tiny sparks smouldered for an instant in the air. He had been going to say something important but he had already forgotten it. No matter. He knelt down at Cat’s feet instead. She leaned forward slowly until their foreheads were touching. Then she lightly kissed his mouth, but her fingers locked warningly in his black hair.

Danny breathed, ‘I love you.’

Cat made a little bubble of a laugh. ‘I know what that means; I’ve heard it all before.’

‘No, no, it isn’t that. I do. I really do.’

‘Yeah, course you do.’

Her flippancy irritated him. He took her chin in his hand, twisting her head a little. The golden light in his head faded to dull, pounding redness.

‘C’mon. Be nice.’

‘You’re hurting me.’

‘You like it.’

‘I don’t. Stop.’

He pushed her backwards, reaching his hand up her skirt.

‘Don’t cocktease. Isn’t this why we’re here? Look, I love you. I mean it.’

‘I mean it.’ Cat was suddenly breathless. The changed note in her voice made Zoe’s eyes snap open.

Rob was afraid of violence. The sight and most of all the sounds of it set waves of panic and terror washing through him. The way that it could erupt out of nowhere as it did now, sudden and hideously defined from the muzzy bonhomie of drink, froze the breath in his lungs and stiffened his limbs into immobility. In the minutes that followed he wanted to shrink and hide, but he made himself act. He felt small and clumsy, but his reactions were quick, as he had learned to make them.

*

The cold air outside hit Rob in the face. He couldn’t quite remember where he had left the van. Danny leaned dazedly against some railings next to the dustbins, rubbing his mouth.

Rob yelled at him. ‘You fucking loser. Bloody come on, will you?’

Rob began to run and after a second Danny thumped in his wake. Far worse demons chased after Rob; images of violence gathered force behind him and loomed out of the blackness so that he ran faster, head bent and arms pumping like a little boy’s, his breath coming in tearing gasps and the fear of a descending blow stiffening his shoulders in anticipation.

They reached the parked van by some stroke of good fortune and flung themselves into it. Rob started the clapped-out engine and reversed with a squeal of tyres, then accelerated hard away from Cat’s street and the railway embankment. Rob tried to remember where he had been and where he should be going. The streets formed an intricate triangle, alternately dark and patched with lurid light. Danny sat slumped sideways in the passenger seat.

Rob muttered, ‘Where the fuck are we?’ The side roads all looked the same. He jerked his head round furiously to Danny.

‘I’m sorry,’ Danny whined. ‘I dunno what happened. I just lost it.’

Rob was afraid of the eruption of violence within himself, as well as in other people. As if he could smell his disgusted fear, Danny wheedled, ‘You’ll stick up for me? Our word against theirs, isn’t it? If they catch us, that is.’

Rob only whispered on an exhaled breath, ‘You little …’ But he didn’t finish. Words that were too similar had been directed at him.

At last they reached the bypass, the open road that Rob had gunned the van down earlier on the way to the club. There was a bump and the tools in the back rattled a warning. He pulled the wheel and the van straightened again, then he blinked into the rear-view mirror and saw it. There was a flashing blue light behind them. He swore and Danny peered at him before looking behind.

‘Shit. Drive,’ Danny howled. ‘Drive, will you?’

Instinctively Rob stamped his boot down hard. There was too much play in the accelerator. The van shuddered and whined and picked up speed. At half past one in the morning there was almost no traffic on the road. They hurtled forward, deafened by the racing engine, and for a minute or two it seemed that the police car was falling back.

‘Yeah. Go, man!’ Danny shouted, with sudden wild elation.

But the police siren was closing on them, audible even over the engine roar. The van juddered as if it would fall apart.

Rob stared ahead. There was a bridge. Concrete pillars daubed with graffiti.

Lights coming the other way. Fast, a dazzle in his eyes. The road vanishing.

Brakes, the brakes. A long squeal, shrieking in his head, echo of an echo. And then a smash. Explosion of glass and metal and pain.

Rob moved his head. There was cold air, and a bright light in his eyes. The light was his own headlamps shining on grass and concrete slewed at a terrible angle. He turned with cold precision and saw that the seat next to him was empty and the passenger door open. Had Danny undone his seat-belt? Or in their hurry to get away from Cat’s had he never fastened it?

To undo his own caused him a breathtaking stab of pain. He swallowed it and pushed the driver’s door open with his shoulder. He crawled out on to the grass and saw a car stopped behind him, someone running. Before anyone reached him he pulled himself around the back of the van because the front was all smashed in against the bridge.

Danny was lying on his side on the verge. Rob knelt down beside him. He saw that there was blood coming out of his ear and nose.

‘Come on, mate.’ He leaned over him. ‘Get up now. Don’t piss about. Just get up, will you?’

Hands grasped his arms and began to drag him backwards.

‘He’s my mate, he’s all right,’ Rob was shouting. ‘What are you doing to him?’

A policeman knelt down in Rob’s place beside Danny.

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