Cath Staincliffe - Stone Cold Red Hot

“Hang on, hang on. Who said I was moving out?”

I blew my nose but it was impossible to breathe through it anymore. “No-one, but it’s obviously a very serious relationship and it’s going to affect us all. If you get married or…”

Children even. There was another whole area to fret about. If Laura wanted children, oh God.

“…well, even if you just live together.”

“Sal!”

I jumped. “Yes?”

“Is this what you wanted to talk about on Tuesday?”

“Sort of, yes.”

“Laura and I haven’t even talked about any of this sort of stuff. We’ve only been going out a few months.”

“But it’s so intense.” I protested.

“Don’t you think I’d have talked to you if I was considering anything like that? Taking Tom and leaving? You’re talking about massive changes.”

“I know.”

I must have looked pathetic because Ray didn’t pursue this ‘what sort of a bastard do you think I am’ line. He just did some sort of Italian shimmy with his hands and muttered some curse I couldn’t translate.

“Watch my lips. Laura and I have no plans to live together, get married, elope or do a runner. Who knows where the relationship will go. But if we even begin to think about anything like that you will know, I promise.”

I swallowed.

“Now you better go get that bath. I’m off to bed. I can take and collect the kids tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” I left the room before I could lose it again.

The water turned dirty grey as I washed, an oily film floated on the surface. It was laborious getting in and out without wetting my dressing, lying with my bad leg up on the side of the bath. The pain returned in my leg and I took two more tablets before I went to bed.

I slept badly. There were bones in my pillow and ashes in my mouth and a small boy in Batman pyjamas flew wheeling and swooping through my dreams…

The pain was the first thing I was aware of when I woke up. It was chewing up the bone in my leg. I took two tablets and lay back, trying to place the snapshots in my mind in some sort of sequence. I went over the events of the previous night twice, from getting in Johnny’s taxi to crying in the kitchen. Then I did my best to blank it out.

I must have been in shock or after-shock. Certainly some altered state which re-ordered all my priorities and which explains, if anything can, what I did that day. Everything was dream-like. Everything was in the distance. I couldn’t concentrate on the unessentials but I was completely focussed on the task I set myself.

After breakfast I tried to get my bike out but the burn soon protested. I wouldn’t be able to pedal the thing even if I could get up onto the saddle. I rang a cab and asked them to pick me up from the Dobson’s address in half-an-hour.

I walked round there’ slowly. I was cold even though the weather was mild. I collected my small tape-recorder from the filing cabinet and checked the tape and batteries. Fine. I was glad I didn’t have to struggle changing batteries one-handed. I put the recorder in my jacket pocket.

The little mosaic vase stood on the cabinet. I picked it up and ran my thumb over the smooth, glass tiles. I thought of Jennifer in her dry, dusty grave, of Carl’s mother, answering her door to a policeman, knowing the news before he spoke, of Mrs Ahmed aching for the feel of her son’s hand in hers, for the light in his eyes. I placed the ornament down carefully and locked up.

I sat back in the cab and let my mind roam. When the taxi drew up to the kerb I felt my stomach tense. I paid the fare and watched him drive away.

I rang the bell, a long push, heard it shrilling inside the house and then the sound of movements, the voice at the door.

“Who is it?” Cautious. Most people open the door without asking.

“Children of Christ.”

“Just a minute,” the chain rattled than she let me in.

“Come in, in here,” she led me into her room.

I switched the tape-recorder on.

She settled in her chair. I sat on the edge of the bed. She looked at me expectantly. I stared back. Her smile faltered and behind the glasses her eyes hardened as she became alert to the possibility of subterfuge.

“You’re not from the church.”

“No. I came the other day, about Jennifer.”

“Get out of my house,” she began to stand up.

“No.” I didn’t raise my voice but I made it clear I wasn’t budging. “I want to know the truth. It’s important to me.”

“You’ve no right.”

“Oh, I think I have. I know what happened to Jennifer, you see. Most of it.”

Expressions flashed across her face; apprehension, outrage, uncertainty.

“Get out,” she repeated, “if you don’t leave now…”

“What will you do? Call the police? They might be interested in the truth as well.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she blustered, “I won’t talk to you.”

“Alright, you listen then. I’ll tell you all about it, about Jennifer. She was a bright girl, got a place at university. Worked hard but she still knew how to enjoy herself, she had some good friends, they speak very warmly of her. She worked too, waitressing, earning money of her own.

“She finished school in 1976. She was due to go to Keele that autumn, she’d got a place studying English, as long as she got her grades. Everyone knew she would. It was a long, hot summer. They declared a drought. Jennifer spent it working at the Bounty, but she got away too, she and Lisa went off to Knebworth, a pop festival. They had a brilliant time. She told you she was going camping.”

Mrs Pickering sat with her head turned away from me, facing the window. From what I could see her face was impassive. Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap.

“But Jennifer never arrived at Keele. She never left home, did she? She couldn’t.”

In the pause there was the faint wheeze of her breath and from outside the shrieks and laughter of a school playtime.

“She went to Keele.”

“No, she didn’t. You know that’s a lie.”

“She went to Keele.”

“She didn’t,” I raised my voice. “She never went there. I’ve spoken to the university, she was never admitted. She never left here.”

“She ran away,” she retorted. “We thought she’d gone there. Maybe it was somewhere else. She ran away.”

“And later that year you invented the story that Jennifer had dropped out of university?”

She hesitated, caught in the web she’d spun, desperately trying to work out whether agreement or denial would best fit her new version of events where Jennifer was a runaway. That moment’s pause removed any last shreds of doubt I had about my suspicions.

“She didn’t run away,” I said plainly. “She’d have been better off if she had. There was a big row I can’t be sure exactly who said what and in what order, but it probably went something like this. Jennifer was pregnant, she told you and your husband. He was appalled, wasn’t he? You both were but with his position in the church to consider, his failure to maintain high moral standards in his own home – well, he’d be beside himself.”

Mrs Pickering was shaking her head as if to ward off a troublesome wasp. She refused to look at me.

“What did he do? Demand to know who the father was? Did she tell? That won’t have helped matters; he was a black boy she’d been seeing. Your husband would have found that hard to stomach, with his racist beliefs. The relationship had finished so marriage would have been out of the question for Jennifer. Did he threaten to disinherit her, denounce her? Or maybe he told her a secret of his own. That she was no daughter of his, that she’d been illegitimate. Bad blood will out. Something like that?”