John Harvey: Still Waters

Resnick was looking at her carefully, uncertain from her tone how ironic she was being.

He found bits and pieces in the back of Hannah’s fridge: a jar of black olive paste, three anchovies at the bottom of a foil-wrapped can, feta cheese; in a wooden bowl on the side were two sorry tomatoes and a small red onion. The bread bin yielded a four-inch length of baguette which, when he took the knife to it, shed crust like brittle paint. Five minutes later, he was sitting with a can of Kronenbourg and his sandwich and chewing thoughtfully, while Hannah made the last of her notes on Carol Ann Duffy’s dramatic monologues, and music played in the background, light and pleasantly soporific.

“You staying, Charlie?”

“If that’s okay.”

Hannah grinned at him and shook her head.

“Don’t take things for granted, that was what you said. Don’t take you for granted.”

“You don’t,” Hannah said.

“Good. I’m glad.”

“Oh, Charlie …”

“What?”

She let her copy of the book slide through her fingers as she reached for him along the settee on which they were both sitting. Her cheek was cool against his mouth, her hand warm against his neck.

“What?” he said again, but by then she was kissing him and neither of them said a great deal more, not even is the back door locked or is it time for bed?

They had not been together long enough for familiarity to determine the when and how of making love. Sometimes-most often-their first movements would be gradual: slow, generally cautious kisses and manipulations; then, in the quickening of arousal, it was generally Hannah who rose over him, hips swiveling down, eyes closed, Resnick’s hands or her own pressed hard against her breasts.

Later she would cry out, knees locked fast against his ribs, a cry that filled Resnick with a kind of aimless pride, even as it scared him with its abandon, its closeness to despair.

No longer inside her, he would fold himself around her, touch the roundness of her calf, the inside of her thigh; pliant, the sticky swell of her belly, fall of her breast against his palm; Resnick’s mouth against her hair.

Leaning back against him, comforted by his size, the bulk of him, Hannah closed her eyes.

Resnick had slept and woken again. From the top of the chest of drawers, Hannah’s clock told him it was shortly after one-thirty. He considered the possibility of sliding from the bed without disturbing her and going back to his own home. Why? Why would he do that? Was he still not really comfortable here?

He had almost reached the bedroom door when Hannah stirred and, waking, called his name.

“You’re not leaving?”

“No.” He pointed to the stairs. “A glass of water. Can I get you anything?”

“Water sounds fine.”

Hannah bunched up the pillows and when Resnick returned they lay on their sides facing one another, Hannah supporting herself on an angled arm as she drank.

“What was the matter with Jane, earlier?”

“Oh, you know … When she got involved in this gender thing, I don’t think she realized how much it would involve. One minute she was making helpful noises, the next she was half an organizing committee of two. Or so it seems. And she thinks it’s important: she wants it to work.”

“And what’s the point of it again?”

“Oh, Charlie, really!”

“I’m only asking.”

“For about the twelfth time. And you can stop that.”

Resnick’s fingers hesitated in the warm cleft behind her knee, looking at her face in the near dark, endeavoring to see if she was serious or not.

“All right,” he said, “I’m listening. Tell me now.”

“Women as victims of violence, sexual mostly. Only what they’ll be looking at here are movies, books too-they’re by women.”

“And that’s supposed to make it better?”

“Different, anyway. Sado-masochism, rape. The whole thing about violence and sexuality, but looked at from the woman’s point of view.” Hannah lay back down again, angling onto her side. “I meant what I said before, you know, when Jane was still here. You might find it interesting; you should go.”

“Hmm,” said Resnick sleepily. “I’ll see.”

After not so many minutes, Hannah heard the tone of his breathing change and in less time than she would have imagined, she was fast asleep herself.

They overlaid into a gray morning. Not significantly, but enough to set them at odds with the day: Hannah concerned that her attempt to interest a bunch of lower-sixth physicists in contemporary poetry would evaporate into still air; Resnick troubled by a mangle of things the stubborn heaviness of his brain would not allow him to unravel or confront. One of those mornings you knew the toast would burn, and it did.

“Maybe,” Hannah said, scraping the worst of the blackened bread into the bin, “we should go back and start again?”

Resnick swallowed his coffee, shrugged his way into his coat. “You really think that’d help?”

“With you in that sort of a mood, I doubt it.”

“I’m not in any kind of mood, I just hate being late.” Aiming for the corner of the table with his mug, he missed.

“Shit!”

Pale blue ceramic with a band of darker blue at its center, it lay in pieces on the tiled floor.

“It doesn’t matter, Charlie. Forget it.”

He looked on, helpless, as Hannah dragged the dustpan and brush from beneath the sink. The mug was one of a pair given to her as a gift. An old boyfriend, Resnick remembered, the peripatetic music teacher she was careful not to talk about too much.

“Look, I’d better get going.”

“Yes.”

Rear door open out into the small yard, he looked back: Hannah at the sink stubbornly refusing to turn her head. The way they had been last night and the way they were now-why was it always such hard work?

He was at the end of the narrow ginnel which ran between the backs of the houses when she caught him.

“Charlie.”

“Um?”

“I’m sorry.”

Relieved, he smiled and brushed a stray fall of hair away from her face. “No need.”

They stood as they were, not moving.

“Is it the job? The promotion, I mean …”

“Serious Crimes?” He shrugged and shuffled a pace or two away. “Maybe.”

“There’ll be other chances, don’t you think?”

About the same as County have, Resnick thought, of getting into the Premiership. “Yes, I dare say.”

With a small smile, Hannah stepped away. “Shall I see you later?”

“I don’t know. I’ll call.”

“Okay.”

At the corner opposite, where he had parked his car, particles of glass silvered up from the roadway like shiny sand. The wing mirror and off-side front window had been broken; nothing, as far as Resnick could see, stolen. He would not have been surprised if the engine had refused to turn, but it caught at the first touch of the ignition and, wearily, he pulled away from the curb, turning left and left again into the early-morning traffic.

Kevin Naylor had drawn early shift: a host of break-ins near the Catholic cathedral, almost certainly kids from what they’d taken, the mess they’d left in their wake; two BMWs and a Rover reported stolen from Cavendish Crescent South; one of the lock-ups back of Derby Road burned out, probably arson.

As part of an ongoing operation, Graham Millington was eagerly awaiting a further meeting with an informant on the verge of shopping the team of three who had knocked over the same post office in Beeston, three times in five days. University graduates, if the informant was to be believed, looking for a way of funding a trip across the States, paying off their student loans.

Lynn Kellogg, meanwhile, was due to interview three sets of neighbors whose houses backed onto one another between Balfour Road and Albert Grove and whose animosity-so far involving dead rodents, broken windows, all-night sound systems, and human excrement-came close to constituting a serious breach of the peace.