Brian Freemantle - Dead End

‘I don’t think so,’ said Parnell. ‘Might suggest closer contact between Russell and myself in the future. But not yet. The backlog’s too big. You sure there’s no purpose in my having a different look at the respiratory experiments?’

‘None,’ said Newton, positively. ‘That’s a principle I work from here, Dick. We don’t waste time with failed ideas. It doesn’t work, we scrap it, move on.’

‘I’ll remember that,’ said Parnell. What was the point of all this?

‘Maybe we should have lunch together again soon.’

‘Good idea now that you can raise your head from the microscope. I look forward to it.’

Another reference, isolated Newton. ‘We’ll do it real soon.’ There very definitely had to be another early-morning trip to New York – arranged from a public kiosk, he reminded himself. Every phone on the research floor was being security monitored.

From the way the Toyota was parked, Parnell saw the damage when he was still some yards away, despite the twilight. The damage began at the passenger door but was worse on the nearside wing, the dents deep enough to have broken a lot of paint. He looked for a culprit’s note under the windscreen wipers. There wasn’t one.

‘Shit,’ he said. He yanked at the nearside wheel, which felt secure enough. He drove slowly through the near-empty car park, satisfying himself there was no wheel damage before he reached the highway.

In the apartment, he made the single evening drink he allowed himself, a strong gin and tonic, briefly undecided but finally ringing Rebecca.

‘You coming to the house?’ she asked at once.

‘Just wanted to talk.’

‘What about?’

‘Some bastard drove into my car, in the car park.’

‘Did they leave a note?’

‘No such luck.’

‘How bad?’

‘Passenger door and wing. The damage kind of goes around to the front, which is slightly buckled.’

‘You told security?’

‘Not yet.’

‘You should,’ she insisted.

‘I will,’ emptily promised Parnell.

‘Don’t put it off.’

‘I won’t.’

‘I’m looking forward to the weekend.’

‘So am I.’

‘You really mean that?’ she asked.

‘I really mean it.’

‘I love you.’

‘I love you too,’ said Parnell, once again wishing he didn’t have so much difficulty saying the words.

Rebecca insisted it was her decision how they spent the weekend, although it was limited to Sunday. She arrived early at Washington Circle and told Parnell to dress in jeans and a work shirt. She refused coffee, which she’d already delayed herself by making in Bethesda. As usual she refused to start the engine until he fastened his seat belt.

‘Now I’m strapped in, tell me where we’re going.’

‘Out into the great big country that you’ve never seen,’ said Rebecca.

‘What if I don’t like it?’

‘Too bad. You’re being kidnapped.’

She drove him, in fact, to Chesapeake Bay to eat the in-season, bite-sized soft-shelled crabs with a pitcher of beer. Despite the jeans and work shirt, Parnell got glued and dirty from the shakers of glutinous salt and herb flavourings and couldn’t properly clean himself up, even in the washroom.

Rebecca said: ‘You think any clean-living, respectable girl would get into bed with someone looking like you do?’

‘No,’ said Parnell. ‘But the food would be worth the abstinence. And you’ve got grunge all around your face, too. I’ll try to develop a treatment for it.’

‘I’ve beaten you!’ Rebecca declared, triumphantly.

‘I’m getting accustomed to it,’ acknowledged Parnell, in weak protest. ‘Beaten me to what, exactly?’

‘The guided tour. You know your way from Washington DC to McLean, North Virginia, and from Washington Circle to Georgetown, and that’s it. Until today. Congratulations! You pushed the covered wagon out beyond the stockade, and hostile Indians aren’t firing arrows.’

‘They didn’t three hundred years ago. Our settlers fired on them first.’

‘Book learning!’ she refused. ‘This is your first great step for mankind.’

Parnell scrubbed his face with a gritty, crumpled paper towel, but didn’t feel any improvement. ‘So, I’m not much fun, eh?’

‘Severely limited.’

‘Why’d you stay?’ He felt safe with the question because the conversation was light, unendangering, although embarrassingly he recognized that Rebecca was making a deserved complaint.

‘We crossed the boundary. Made the commitment we always held back from. Which we still seem to be holding back from.’

‘I could blame work. But I won’t.’

‘Good. You changed your mind?’

‘No. I wasn’t sure if you might have done.’ That wasn’t entirely true, he admitted to himself.

‘You could have asked.’

‘You keep nagging and I will blame work.’

‘You do that and I’ll know you’ve changed your mind.’

‘You ever think of studying law rather than science? You’d have made a great prosecuting attorney.’

‘That how it sounds to you, a prosecution?’

The lightness was going, as he’d feared it would. ‘No, that’s not how it sounds at all. I’m sorry and I’m wrong and I have put work before anything else, before you, and that’s badly wrong, too.’ It was at Rebecca’s urging that he’d imposed a permanent Sunday-off edict and a seven-at-night finish, despite which people still often remained later at their benches, Parnell the latest stayer of all.

Silence encompassed them in a restaurant that was no more than a bare, trestle-tabled shack with a pier that thrust out into the bay and in which they sat with hands and faces tightening with the glue of the flavouring salt. They laughed, unprompted but simultaneously, reached out sticky fingers and Parnell said: ‘How the hell did that build up!’

Rebecca said: ‘I planned it. Angry at me?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve got to go on now. I don’t have any words.’

Parnell wasn’t sure he had, either. ‘Are we talking marriage…?’

‘No!’ The quickness – and vehemence – of the rejection visibly startled him and Rebecca said: ‘This really isn’t the place to have this sort of conversation.’

Parnell wasn’t sure what sort of conversation they were having. ‘Your choice. You take it.’

Rebecca slid her hand away from his, holding both of hers tightly before her, staring down at them as if they held some message. ‘Yes. It is my choice.’

Aware of her tension, he said: ‘I don’t want to go on with this, not here, not now. Not if you don’t want to.’

She said: ‘This was supposed to be a day out! How the fuck did it get to this?’

‘Let’s stop,’ he said.

‘No!’ Rebecca refused again, still vehement, but just as abruptly stopped.

Parnell waited.

‘You want to go on: us, I mean?’ she said finally.

‘Yes.’

‘You can’t decide that yet.’

Parnell saw that Rebecca’s knuckles were whitening, so hard was she gripping one hand against the other, and there were shudders rippling through her. ‘Don’t, darling. Whatever it is, don’t.’

Rebecca’s words came out in spurts. ‘I have to. Everything has to be clear, out in the open. I had a relationship. Two years ago. Got pregnant. He wasn’t sure, so I had a termination. That’s why I have to be sure now. I’ve done all the pushing and I wish I hadn’t now and today is a total fucking mess and I’m sorry I ever started it and I…’

‘… wish you’d shut up,’ interrupted Parnell.

Rebecca did.

He stretched across the table and took her clenched hands once more, prising them open, stroking them. ‘Don’t be frightened.’