John Harvey - Off Minor

Lorraine remembered once, a month or so back, she had been feeling especially loving, had put a CD on the machine herself and sat, cross-legged, on the carpet near Michael’s chair, resting her head against his knee. When “The Lady in Red” had come on, she had asked, something of a wistful quality in her voice, “Do you remember, Michael, when we first heard this?”

“No,” Michael said. “Should I?”

Lorraine sat in front of the mirror, dabbing a ball of mauve cotton wool around her eyes. She could hear Michael urinating in the bathroom, one thing her mother would never have stood for. She would go on and on at Lorraine’s dad, telling him if he couldn’t direct his flow quietly against the sides of the bowl, then please be thoughtful enough to run the cold tap until he was through performing. Michael didn’t even close the bathroom door.

And as for farting … well, she didn’t think her mother acknowledged that the word existed, never mind the deed. Not in the nice part of Rugeley, where they lived.

“Tired?” she asked, as Michael rolled into bed alongside her.

“Knackered!”

“Poor sweetheart!”

She reached under the duvet and began, lightly, to stroke his stomach, just gently, but he grunted and rolled over, shrugging her away.

That was that.

If she’d been Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman , Lorraine thought, she wouldn’t allow herself to be so easily dissuaded. She would run her fingers down his back, but firmly, carry on till she was past his buttocks, wait until his legs widened apart.

As they surely would: if she were Julia Roberts.

Now Michael curled away on to his side and was beginning to snore.

“Michael,” she said, nudging him with her toe.

“I was just getting off to sleep.”

“What I was going to say before, you know when you were in the shower …”

“That was hours ago.”

“I know. Only …”

“Only what, for heaven’s sake?”

“That little girl, the one that went missing. You know, it was all over the papers …”

“What about her?”

“They found her body. She’d been murdered.”

Michael turned over sharply, facing her. “Of course she had. What else did you think had happened?”

When Lorraine awoke, the clock at her side of the bed read 3:28. At first she thought Michael had stirred, disturbing her, either that or she needed to go to the bathroom and relieve her bladder. When she realized it was neither, she slid her legs beneath the duvet and found her slippers on the floor. Her dressing gown was hanging behind the bedroom door.

Emily lay upside down with one leg hanging over the side of the bed, the other beneath the pillow. Her head was pushed against the wooden base, strands of auburn hair trailing down. Her nightie had become nicked up in the tangle of sheet around her waist and Lorraine, careful not to wake her, eased it back over her legs.

Since Michael had been forced to take a job almost two hours away, his daughter was frequently in bed before he returned home; the only time he got to see her was forty-five minutes in the mornings and at weekends. It was Lorraine who fetched her from school, who made her tea and listened to her chatter; said, “Ooh! Yes, lovely!” at her paintings-great sploshes of red and purple on gray paper, which later were stuck to the fridge-freezer door.

It was Lorraine, more often now than not, who dropped Emily off at Diana’s house, her mother, Michael’s first wife; Lorraine who collected her, seven hours later, trying not to notice the older woman’s face, the dark and swollen eyes, the tears.

Lorraine wasn’t sure how long she stood there in the half-dark, looking down at her stepdaughter, while the images conjured up by the news report nibbled away at the edges of her mind.

Patel had been out on the street for less than an hour: a dull, run-of-the-mill end-of-year day, the kind that promises nothing, other than sooner or later it will end, when someone spat in his face.

He was on his way to interview the assistant manager of a building society near the corner of Lister Gate and Low Pavement about a recent robbery; wondering if, while he was there, he might ask about applying for a loan, moving upscale to something a little quieter, less prone to woodworm and suspect drains.

On the descent past M amp; S, shaking his head politely, sorry, no, at the part-time market researchers who hovered hopefully with their clip boards and part-time smiles, Patel paused to look down at the painting a young man was reproducing in chalk on the flag stones, a Renaissance madonna and child. A little further on, close by the crossroads, a muscular black mime artist, in singlet and sweat pants despite the temperature, was making slow-motion moves to the taped accompaniment of what Patel understood to be electro-funk. Quite a crowd had gathered in a rough circle, mostly admiring. Patel walked around the outer edge, taking his time. The clock above the Council House had not long sounded the quarter hour and his appointment was for half past. He was reaching into his trouser pocket for a coin to throw down into the performer’s hat, when a blue van, descending Low Pavement towards the pedestrianized cross-street, braked sharply to avoid colliding with a pram.

The woman, thirties, black Lycra pants and a fake-fur coat, cigarette trailing from one hand, swerved the pram sharply round, its rear wheel finishing only a foot or so away from the offside wing of the van.

“Great daft bastard!” she shouted. “What the ’ell d’you think you’re doing? No right to be driving down here any rate. Not like that, you’re sodding not.”

“Lady …” tried the driver through his partly wound-down window.

“Nearly ran smack into me, you know that. Right into the effing pram.”

“Sweetheart …”

“If I’d not had me eyes about me, you’d have gone right sodding over it, baby an’ all. Then what would you be doing?”

“Darling …”

“Up in bloody court on bleeding manslaughter.”

“Look …”

“You effing look!”

Shaking his head, as if to suggest to the crowd deserting the mime show for this new drama that he wasn’t wasting any more of his breath, the driver wound up his window and engaged gear. The woman promptly stepped away from her pram and planted a kick low on the door, hard enough to dent the panel.

The driver rapidly wound his window back down. “Watch it!”

“You effing watch it! Who you telling to watch it? You’re the one, came down here, sixty miles an hour. Selfish bastard!” And she kicked the door a second time.

“Right!” The driver wrenched open the van door and climbed out.

The crowd fell quiet.

“Excuse me,” Patel said, stepping forward. “Excuse me,” setting himself between them, “madam, sir.”

“Fuck off, you!” shouted the woman. “Who asked you to butt your nose in?”

“Yeh,” said the driver, giving Patel a push in the back, “one thing we don’t need, advice from the likes of you.”

“All I am trying to do …” Patel tried.

“Look,” the driver said, moving round him. “Piss off!”

“I …” said Patel, reaching into his pocket for his identification.

“Piss off!” said the woman, and, with a quick backward arch of her head, she spat into Patel’s face.

“I am a police officer,” Patel finished, blinking away phlegm and saliva.

“Yeh,” said the woman. “And I’m the Queen of Sheba.” Patel let his fingers slide from his warrant card and reached for a tissue instead. The driver got back into his van and the woman reversed her pram around him. Within moments, they were on their respective ways and most of the crowd had gone back to watching the mime or were wandering off to continue window shopping. Only Lynn Kellogg stayed where she was, in the doorway of Wallis’s, doubtful if Patel had spotted her and wondering whether the tactful thing would be to slip away unnoticed.