Peter Robinson - Aftermath

“I don’t mean… well, not now. I mean, not you and me. But ever?”

Annie lay still and silent for a while. He felt her relax a little and stir against him. Finally, she said. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. It’s been on my mind. This case, the poor devils in the Murray and Godwin families, all the missing girls, not much more than kids, really. And the Wrays, her being pregnant.” And Sandra, he thought, but he hadn’t told Annie about that yet.

“I can’t say as I have,” Annie answered.

“Never?”

“Maybe I got shortchanged when it came to handing out the maternal instinct, I don’t know. Or maybe it’s to do with my own past. Anyway, it never came up.”

“Your past?”

“Ray. The commune. My mother dying so young.”

“But you said you were happy enough.”

“I was.” Annie sat up and reached for the glass of wine she had put on the bedside table. Her small breasts glowed in the dim light, smooth skin sloping down to the dark brown areolas, slightly upturned where the nipples rose.

“Then why?”

“Good Lord, Alan, surely it’s not every woman’s duty in life to reproduce or to analyze why she doesn’t want to. I’m not a freak, you know.”

“I know. Sorry.” Banks sipped some of his wine, lay back against the pillows. “It’s just… well, I had a bit of a shock the other day, that’s all.”

“What?”

“Sandra.”

“What about her?”

“She’s pregnant.” There, he’d done it. He didn’t know why it should have been so difficult, or why he had the sharp, sudden feeling that he would have been wiser to have kept his mouth closed. He also wondered why he had told Jenny straight away but delayed so long before telling Annie. Partly it was because Jenny knew Sandra, of course, but there was more to it than that. Annie didn’t seem to like the intimacy implied by details of Banks’s life, and she had sometimes made him feel that sharing any part of his past was a burden to her. But he couldn’t seem to help himself. Since splitting up with Sandra, he had become far more introspective and examined his life much more closely. He saw little point in being with someone if he couldn’t share some of that.

At first, Annie said nothing, then she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did you hear the news?”

“From Tracy, when we went to lunch in Leeds.”

“So Sandra didn’t tell you herself?”

“You know as well I do we don’t communicate much.”

“Still, I would’ve thought… something like this.”

Banks scratched his cheek. “Well, it just goes to show, doesn’t it?”

Annie sipped more wine. “Show what?”

“How far apart we’ve grown.”

“You seem upset by this, Alan.”

“Not really. Not upset so much as…”

“Disturbed?”

“Perhaps.”

“Why?”

“Just the thought of it. Of Tracy and Brian having a little brother or sister. Of…”

“Of what?”

“I was just thinking,” Banks said, turning toward her. “I mean, it’s something I haven’t thought about in years, denied it, I suppose, but this has brought it all back.”

“All what back?”

“The miscarriage.”

Annie froze for a moment, then said, “Sandra had a miscarriage?”

“Yes.”

“When was that?”

“Oh, years ago, when we were living in London. The kids were small, too small to understand.”

“What happened?”

“I was working undercover at the time. Drugs squad. You know what it’s like, away for weeks at a time, can’t contact your family. It was two days before my boss let me know.”

Annie nodded. Banks knew that she understood about the pressures and stresses of undercover work firsthand; a knowledge of the Job and its effects was one of the things they had in common. “How did it happen?”

“Who knows? The kids were at school. She started bleeding. Thank God we had a helpful neighbor, or who knows what might have happened.”

“And you blame yourself for not being there?”

“She could have died, Annie. And we lost the baby. Everything might have gone just fine if I’d been there like any other father-to-be, helping out around the place. But Sandra had to do everything, for crying out loud – all the lifting, shopping, odd jobs, fetching and carrying. She was replacing a lightbulb when she first started to feel funny. She could have fallen and broken her neck.” Banks reached for a cigarette. He didn’t usually indulge in the “one after” for Annie’s sake, but this time he felt like it. He still asked, “Is it okay?”

“Go ahead. I don’t mind.” Annie sipped more wine. “But thanks for asking. You were saying?”

Banks lit up and the smoke drifted away toward the half-open window. “Guilt. Yes. But more than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was working drugs, like I said, spending most of my time on the streets or in filthy squats trying to get a lead to the big guys from their victims. Kids, for the most part, runaways, stoned, high, tripping, zonked out, whatever you care to call it. Some of them as young as ten or eleven. Half of them couldn’t even tell you their own names. Or wouldn’t. I don’t know if you remember, but it was around the time the AIDS scare was growing. Nobody knew for sure yet how bad it was, but there was a lot of scare-mongering. And everyone knew you got it through blood, from unprotected sex – mostly anal sex – and through sharing needles. Thing was, you lived in fear. You just didn’t know if some small-time dealer was going to lunge at you with a dirty needle, or if some junkie’s drool on your hand could give you AIDS.”

“I do know what you mean, Alan, though it was a bit before my time as a copper. But I’m not following. What has it got to do with Sandra’s miscarriage?”

Banks sucked in some smoke, felt it burn on the way down and thought he ought to try stopping again. “Probably nothing, but I’m just trying to give you some sense of the life I was living. I was in my early thirties, with a wife and two kids, another on the way, and I was spending my life in squalor, hanging out with scum. My own kids probably wouldn’t have recognized me if they’d seen me in the street. The kids I saw were either dead or dying. I was a cop, not a social worker. I mean, I tried sometimes, you know, if I thought there was a chance a kid might listen, give up the life and go home, but that wasn’t my job. I was there to get information and to track down the big players.”

“And?”

“Well, it’s just that it has an effect on you, that’s all. It changes you, warps you, alters your attitudes. You start out thinking you’re an ordinary decent family man just doing a tough job, and you end up not really knowing what you are. Anyway, my first thought, when I heard Sandra was okay but that she’d had a miscarriage… Know what my first feeling was?”

“Relief?” said Annie.

Banks stared at her. “What made you say that?”

She gave him a small smile. “Common sense. It’s what I’d feel – I mean if I’d been in your boots.”

Banks stubbed out the cigarette. He felt somehow deflated that his big revelation had seemed so obvious to Annie. He swirled some red wine around in his mouth to wash away the taste of smoke. Van Morrison was well into “Madame George,” riffing on the words. A cat howled in the woods, maybe the one that came for milk sometimes. “Anyway,” he went on, “that’s what I felt: relief. And of course I felt guilty. Not for just not being there, but for being almost glad it happened. And relieved that we wouldn’t have to go through it all again. The dirty nappies, the lack of sleep – not that I was getting much sleep anyway – the extra responsibility. Here was one life I didn’t have to protect. Here was one extra responsibility I could easily live without.”