Peter Helton - Falling More Slowly

The printer on the other hand was a pain in the arse. Reed cleared another paper jam. The print on his home-made leaflets was too pale and a bit stripy, not at all the stark-looking warning he had been aiming for. But they’d get the message.

He could only do a few cars at a time. Of the five students in this house all but Vicky were totally apathetic. A couple of them had come on the Saturday Traffic Protest once and that was it. Direct action wasn’t their style. Any action really. They didn’t even bother to vote. As far as he could see they were all at uni so they could one day become part of the establishment and add their own 4?4s to the madness and consume until the planet was dead.

He left the printer chewing on the leaflets and went and knocked on Vicky’s door. Loud, synthetic dance music thumped on the other side. He knocked harder.

The music blasted him as Vicky at last opened the door. ‘Oh, hi.’ She went back to piling her hair into a mess on top of her head in front of a narrow length of mirror glass, giving a grunt of frustration when the arrangement snaked apart. She started all over again. As she lifted her arms her short dress rode up high enough to gave him a glimpse of black knickers.

‘You’re wearing a dress?’

‘Yeah. Look all right?’

She’d forgotten. Obvious. ‘Not very practical.’

‘That always depends.’ She could see Chris in the mirror. He was so scruffy. Someone should take the man in hand. For a mature student he was all right really. He had some valid ideas, stuff to say. But it got boring very quickly. Chris the one-trick pony. ‘I’m going out tonight. We’re meeting at the Watershed.’

He crossed the room to the mini system and turned down the moronic music. ‘We were going to do some cars tonight. You said you’d come.’

‘No, don’t do that, it gets me in the mood.’ She turned it up again and returned to her mirror. ‘I must have forgotten. Next time. I’ll come with you next time. Who else is going anyway?’ She asked purely for something to say, she really wasn’t in the mood for Chris tonight and she knew there’d be no one else. In theory Chris’s raids were quite a laugh, in practice they were cold and yucky.

‘It’s just us.’ He knew she wouldn’t change her mind now, she had her make-up done and everything, but he wouldn’t let her off so easily.

‘Sorry, we could do it tomorrow night, what’s wrong with tomorrow?’

‘I’ll do it by myself then. Won’t be able to do many cars but at least it’s a start. Then we can do some more tomorrow.’

‘Oh no, just remembered, I can’t tomorrow, I’m going up to see my parents for a couple of days, aren’t I? Dad’s birthday, they sent me a train ticket.’

He left her room without a word and slammed the door behind him, regretting it instantly. He couldn’t afford to alienate the girl. But how were they ever going to make a difference if dancing and birthdays took precedence over saving the planet? He found lots of support for what he had to say on the net, in the forums and chat rooms, but actually getting stuff off the ground yourself was a lot harder. He hadn’t managed to find many recruits and of the few he did find, only Vicky was left to help him. When she felt like it. Ah well, he’d do it tonight and he’d do it by himself.

Tiny, tiny hairs. Backlit by the weak morning light that modelled the contours of the girl’s stomach. There had to be thousands of little downy hairs and he liked them. From this vantage point — his head resting on her thigh — he could see some of them moving in his breath. The pierced belly button was, on close inspection, not an improvement on the original design. During their lovemaking he’d been scared of catching his hair on it, ripping it out by accident. It was quite safe, Rebecca had told him. Didn’t he like it? No, no, it looked fine. A tiny enamelled daisy. He touched it now with his middle finger, waggled it about a bit. It made him shiver. Rebecca remained fast asleep. Or pretended to be fast asleep, sometimes just as good.

Why couldn’t they stick to earrings? Earrings were all right, much nicer in fact. Was it a sign he was slipping into ‘young middle age’? Was that why he’d chatted up the barmaid in the first place, to reassure himself that everything was still there, everything was just as it was before Laura?

The two-bar heater from the junk shop had been on all night while they slept and the room was unnaturally warm. The girl had kicked away the duvet after their last, lazy lovemaking. McLusky propped himself up on one elbow and studied her body: the hollow of her stomach, her taut flanks, her breasts unbothered by gravity, her long neck curved away from him, her exactly shoulder-length blonde hair, the perfect ovals of her nostrils.

He had enjoyed her body but images of Laura had constantly intruded, offering themselves for comparison. Sight, touch, smell, energy and size, everything was different. No better or worse, just different and somehow vaguely irritating, not exciting and energizing as it should have been. But these tiny hairs he liked.

Somewhere under the jumble of clothes and duvet by the side of the mattress his mobile chimed faintly and patiently. He scrabbled around for it, leaning across the girl’s body as he did so, making her stir. At last he found it and answered it. ‘McLusky.’

Rebecca opened her eyes. She gave him a look from sleep-narrowed eyes to go with her brief ironic smile.

The voice at the other end sounded bright and showered and wide-awake. ‘Morning, inspector, it’s Louise Rennie … Chemistry department? Bristol Uni?’

‘Ehm, yes. Morning. Morning, doctor.’ The girl wriggled from under him into an upright position and started clinking through the Pilsener bottles by the side of the bed, lifting each in turn without luck. ‘Have you had a new thought, Dr Rennie?’ He was wide awake now.

‘Yes, you could call it that. I have two tickets for The Duchess of Malfi at the Tobacco Factory for tonight and I wondered if you’d like to come.’

‘Ah. I see. Ehm …’ The girl lit one of his cigarettes and got up. McLusky’s eyes followed her breasts out of the room. ‘Yes, that would be … great. Shakespeare?’ So that’s what he had left her his number for. He lit a cigarette himself and inhaled deeply.

‘No, the other guy. The performance starts at eight. Can you meet me in the cafe at seven?’

‘I’ll do my best. Which cafe?’

‘The one at the Factory, inspector.’

‘Makes sense.’ The flush from the toilet seemed excessively loud. The girl padded back into the room and broke into a cough. McLusky coughed unconvincingly, trying to claim it as his own.

‘You should try and give up smoking. Both of you. See you at seven, inspector.’

He put the phone down and checked the time. Rebecca was dressing. He watched her legs disappear into preruined jeans and her breasts under T-shirt and sweater. The little pang of regret he felt made him wonder if he was likely to see them again.

By the afternoon five hours of meetings, report-sifting and fruitless phone calls had nearly succeeded in driving Rebecca’s breasts from his mind. Now, in stark contrast, he was staring at his least favourite thing, CCTV footage. The CCTV operation for the city centre was being coordinated from a single suite of hi-tech offices. McLusky had spent half an hour there, in an office where recorded incidents could be analysed and copies made, before he decided that he couldn’t concentrate in the place. The subliminal electronic buzz of hundreds of monitors thickened the air around him into an electronic fog and produced a dull headache behind his eyes.

The few staff were helpful but they were also very busy. When he’d arrived and been shown around they’d been in the process of directing police by radio to a fist fight outside a launderette, a car break-in, shoplifters tracked through the centre, a speeding pair of scooters and a group of kids lobbing bottles from recycling bins at each other across a pedestrianized street. On yet another monitor McLusky saw a middle-aged woman, perhaps drunk, perhaps taken ill, lying on the pavement near a newsagent’s. Pedestrians were neatly stepping around her, pretending not to notice.