John Harvey: Cold Light

She slid out from beneath Gary’s sleeping body and eased herself to the edge of the bed. Always the same, the way he would turn towards her each night, arm and the heft of his thigh heavily upon her. Weighing her down. Since they’d been moved here it was worse. He couldn’t sleep without her. Holding her breath, Michelle waited for the thin squeak of the bedframe to still. Cracked lino cold at her feet. Gary sighed and when she looked round she could see his face, young in the faint light, open-mouthed. She saw the way one hand gripped the sheet, the knot of skin above his eyes, and was thankful she knew nothing of his dreams.

Slipping one of Gary’s sweaters over her T-shirt, a pair of his socks on to her feet, she left the room.

The children had a bedroom of their own along the narrow landing, but these past weeks it had been too cold. Ice overlapping on the insides of the windows and their breath pigeoning the air. Get an oil stove in there, neighbors had said, keep it low. But Michelle knew of two house fires less than half a mile from here since winter had set in, ladders reaching up too late and never close enough, kiddies trapped upstairs and overcome by fumes.

Now they banked up the living-room fire with slack, made sure the guard borrowed from her parents’ home was fixed in place. Natalie’s cot they lifted into the middle of the room once the TV had been switched off and Karl’s bed was the settee, curled beneath a nest of coats and blankets, thumb in mouth and dead to the world.

Downstairs, Michelle smiled at the baby, who had wriggled round again until her head was pressed against the bottom corner of the cot, one leg poked through the bars. Raising both hands to her mouth, Michelle warmed them before touching her daughter’s tiny foot and easing it back, carefully, out of the cold. Both of them would need changing when they woke. She was reminded that it was her bladder that had woken her and she braced herself for the bathroom, the old scullery that had been converted and badly, quarry tiles laid on bare earth and made uneven by the frost.

She rubbed a circle from the inside of the window and the dark looked back at her. No more than two or three blurred lights pale along the street. If she were lucky, she might yet sit with yesterday’s paper and a pot of tea, a little stolen time before the children woke to crying and she heard Gary’s feet upon the stairs.

Resnick had been awake since four. So attuned to disruption, he had been blinking back sleep and reaching towards the telephone before, it seemed, he had heard its first ring. Kevin Naylor’s voice was indistinct and oddly distant and Resnick, irritably, had to ask him to repeat everything twice.

“Sorry, sir, it’s this mobile phone.”

All Resnick heard were particles of words, breaking up like starlings in the early morning air.

“Redial,” Resnick said, “and try again.”

“Sorry, sir. Can’t hear you.”

Resnick cursed and broke the connection himself and when Naylor rang back he could hear him perfectly. A taxi driver had been taking two youths from the city center to an address in West Bridgford; as they neared Lady Bay Bridge, one of them had tapped on the window, asked the driver to pull over as his mate was feeling sick, like to throw up. When one young man got out of the car on to the pavement, the other went around to the driver’s side and threatened him with an iron bar. Before the driver could pull away, the windscreen had been splintered in his face. The youths dragged him out of the cab and beat him around the head and body. He had been crawling across the center of the road when a milk lorry turned on to the bridge and stopped. The youths had run off and the driver’s takings had gone with them.

“The weapon?” Resnick asked.

“Tried to chuck it into the Trent, sir, but only landed in the mud.”

“And the driver?”

“Queen’s. Accident and Emergency.”

“Who’s with him?”

“Uniform patrol should be there now, sir. There’s nobody …”

“Graham Millington …”

“Leave, sir. He and the wife, they were going away. In-laws, I …”

Resnick sighed; he should have remembered. “Divine, then. But I want someone with him all the time. The cabbie. We don’t know how many chances we’ll get.”

“I could …”

“You stay where you are.” Resnick narrowed his eyes towards the bedside clock. “Twenty minutes, I’ll be there. And see no one gets their sticky fingers all over that cab.”

Absent-mindedly, he lifted away a cat that had folded itself into his lap and set it back down on the bed. One of the others was over by the bedroom door, scratching its head against the heavy edge of wood. The last time something like this had happened, the weapon had been a baseball bat and the taxi driver had died. Quickly, he showered and dressed and went downstairs, grinding coffee for a cup he would only half drink before stepping out into the cold light of another day.

“Bloody hell!” Gary said. “What sodding time is it?”

“It’s late.”

“It’s what?”

“It’s past seven.”

“And you reckon that’s late, do you?”

Michelle arched her back and shifted the baby’s weight against her arm. She didn’t think Natalie was taking any milk now, just suckling for the comfort of it. “Depends how long you’ve been up,” she said.

Gary was leaning sideways inside the doorway, head stooped, still wearing the boxer shorts and County shirt he had slept in. “I’ve been down since before six,” Michelle told him, though he hadn’t asked.

Gary gave himself a scratch and walked past the end of the table where she was sitting. “I suppose that’s my fault, too,” he said, not quite loud enough for her to be certain.

“What?”

“You heard.”

“If I heard, why would I …?”

“You waking so early, I suppose it was my fault.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“What’s silly? Don’t tell me I’m fucking silly. Everything else is my fault, why not that?”

“Gary …”

“What?”

Sitting between them, eating a mush of warm milk and cornflakes too big for his mouth, two-year-old Karl’s eyes flicked from one to the other.

“Gary, no one’s saying it’s your fault. Not any of it.”

“No?”

“No.”

He tossed his head and glanced away. “Wasn’t what you said the other day.”

“Gary, I was angry. I lost my temper, right? Don’t you ever lose your temper?”

She knew it was a stupid thing to say. She watched his fingers tighten around the curve of the kitchen chair.

“Gary …”

Michelle stood carefully with the baby still at her breast and went to him. He turned from her and she rested the side of her face soft against his back, unkempt curl of her hair brushing the nape of his neck. The baby wriggled a little between them and Michelle shushed into the feathery down of her head.

The last job Gary had had, six months back, laboring on a building site, cash in hand at the end of the week, no questions asked, had ended when the firm went bankrupt. Gary had turned in one morning to find the whole place cordoned off, all the heavy machinery being repossessed. Before that it had been the night shift in a factory that manufactured plastic switches for the fitments on table lamps. Then there had been piece-work, Sellotaping free floppy disks to the covers of a short-lived computer software magazine. Three jobs in as many years. More than a lot of people they knew; more than most.

“Gary?”

“Mmm?”

But he knew. Michelle’s free hand was stroking him through the striped cotton of his shirt, sliding up against the edges of his ribcage, along the flat of stomach just above the top of his shorts. She craned up to kiss him and his mouth was slightly sour from sleep. Behind them, Karl spun his spoon around the bowl too fast and it landed on the floor. Michelle lifted Natalie away from her breast as she turned and at once the baby screwed up her face and began to cry.