John Harvey - Cold Light

The time Nancy had come home unexpected and found her flatmate grappling with a seventeen-year-old on the living-room carpet had been, in more ways than one, a revelation. “He’s advanced for his age,” Dana had explained. “Two A-levels already. Working hard for his Cambridge entrance.”

“I noticed,” Nancy had said. What she’d noticed were the marks on the youth’s back as he’d pulled his Simple Minds T-shirt on over his head.

“Didn’t I tell you,” Nancy said now, “this Gary, we went to the same school?”

“No, really?”

“Yes, two years below me.”

“And that’s his name? Gary?”

“Uh-hum.”

“And you remembered him?” Dana was standing slightly on tiptoe before the bathroom mirror, examining her breasts.

“Not at all.”

“Then he remembered you.”

Nancy wound the first towel around her head and reached for another. “I used to go out with this boy, he was a friend of Gary’s big brother.”

“You see, it all makes sense. There he was, Gary, adoring you from afar and you never as much as noticed him. The stuff that pimply wet dreams are made of.”

Nancy grimaced and laughed and pretended to throw up over the toilet bowl.

“You don’t think this is a lump, do you? Look, here?”

Serious, Nancy stared at her friend’s left breast. “I don’t know. I can’t see any …”’

“Feel.”

Nancy reached out a hand and Dana took it, guiding it to the right spot.

“Well?”

Pressing down with her fingertips, Nancy rolled the flesh across and back; there was something there, the smallest knot of muscle possibly, not a lump. “No,” she said, “I think you’re fine. Nothing to worry about at all.”

“Of course not,” Dana smiled. Another of her friends, just thirty-five, was due in hospital for a mastectomy first thing in the new year.

“Can I borrow your hairdryer?” Nancy asked. “Mine’s on the blink.” And then at the bathroom door-“This do tonight, we don’t have to get too dressed up, do we?”

Dana’s smile was genuine this time. “Only to the nines.”

What might have helped, Nancy thought, on her way to the bedroom, if this afternoon had been more of a fright than actually it was, it might have done something to bring me on, get this blasted period of mine moving.

Martin Wrigglesworth no longer considered his working days in terms of good or bad; simply, they were gradations of the latter-bad, less bad, badder, baddest. A classical education not entirely gone to waste. There were days, he thought, his ail-but clapped-out Renault Five stalling at the Noel Street lights, when the whole of Forest Fields should be swept into care. Why stop there? Hyson Green. Radford. The lot. Wheel everyone over sixty into residential homes for the aged; whisk children under eleven into the welcoming arms of foster parents, twelve-to-seventeen-year-olds into youth custody. Anyone left could be swept on to a massive Workfare program and work for their dole, performing useful services like cutting the grass on the Forest with nail clippers through the daylight hours. Those were the thoughts that got Martin through his less bad days.

At home in Nuthall at weekends, repainting the bathroom, waiting to collect the boys from swimming, helping his wife fold the washing in from the line, he tried to recall the exact moment, the feeling that had drawn him into social work, a good and honorable profession.

And what, Martin thought, turning into another narrow street in a warren of narrow streets, could he do? What honorable course might he take? Brutus would happily have fallen on his sword, of course, being an honorable man, but so far the mortgage and the pension plan and the irredeemable dream of renovating a dilapidated farmhouse in the South of France had kept any such thought firmly in Martin’s scabbard.

“Martin,” his wife would say wearily over her marking, “if it’s making you feel so low, why don’t you hand in your notice? Resign. You’ll find something else.” With over three million out of work, he knew only too well what be would find. Instead of resigning he was resigned.

Number 37, he said to himself, checking the hastily scribbled note on the seat beside him. A row of two-story, flat-fronted houses, front rooms opening out onto the street. Locking the car, he crossed the narrow, uneven pavement towards the chipped paint of the door. A late referral from a police officer fearful for the safety of a child: Lord knows what he would find on the other side. Not so long ago, here in the city, a young mother had dipped her two-year-old son’s penis in hot tea and spun him round inside a spin dryer.

“Hello,” he said, as Michelle opened the front door. “Ms. Paley? Martin Wrigglesworth, Social Services …” Showing her his card. “… I’ve called round about your son, er, Karl. I wonder if we might talk inside?”

“How do I look?”

Nancy was standing in the entrance to Dana’s room in a silver crochet top, short black skirt, silver-gray tights with a pattern of raised silver dots, leather ankle boots with a slight heel. When Dana had asked her, back in mid-November, if she would like to go along to her firm’s Christmas dinner and dance, it had seemed like a good idea. “Terrific,” Dana enthused. “You look terrific.”

“I feel ten feet tall.”

“Better than five feet wide like me.” Dana looked as if she had dived into her wardrobe head first and emerged swathed in color, bright yellows, purple, and green. Nancy was reminded of a parakeet with cleavage.

“No, seriously, I feel stupid.”

“You look wonderful. Every man in that room is going to take one look at you …”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

“… and be falling over themselves asking you to dance.”

Nancy was looking at herself in Dana’s full-length mirror. “I look like I’m auditioning for principal boy in Aladdin .”

“So, fine. You’ll get the part.”

Nancy recrossed the room, trying to walk small. She’d met one or two of them already, architects and such, they hadn’t seemed too bad. More interesting than the people she worked with herself. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t go at all. They’re your friends, people you work with, I shall hardly know a soul.”

“ You’re my friend. And besides, I’ve told them all about you …” Nancy placed one hand over her eyes. “… and one more thing, there’s no refund on the price of your ticket.”

“All right,” Nancy said, “you talked me into it. I’m coming.”

Dana lifted her watch from the dressing table and, held it closer to her face. “Taxi’s here in twenty minutes.”

“I thought we didn’t have to be there till eight?”

“We’re meeting first for a drink at Sarah Brown’s.”

“Won’t it be terribly crowded?”

“All the better. Rub shoulders with the rich and nearly famous.”

“All the same,” Martin Wrigglesworth was saying to Michelle, “I think, just to be certain, I’d be happier if we could just pop him along to the doctor, let someone have a proper look at him.” From somewhere he dredged up a smile. “Better safe than sorry.”

“You don’t mean now?” Michelle asked. “You want to take him to the doctor now?”

“Yes,” Martin said, clipping his biro into his top pocket. “Now.”

The taxi arrived almost fifteen minutes early and the driver wanted to charge them waiting time, but Dana soon disabused him of that. Nancy had changed out of her black skirt into a pair of loose-fitting black trousers and then back into her skirt again. She had borrowed one of Dana’s topcoats, bright red wool, a regular bull’s delight.

“You’ve got your ticket?”