Lucie Whitehouse - Critical Incidents

‘Ah, that’s the bit she’s not telling us, isn’t it?’ Luke grinned. ‘It wasn’t just one thing – she was on a written warning before. She’s been busting that poor guy’s balls from the moment he started there. This was just the final straw.’

‘Language.’

‘Sorry, Mum, but I’m right, aren’t I? She couldn’t keep her mouth shut and this is what happened. With Adrian, too, I bet – no wonder he dumped her. That poor bas—’

‘Luke!’

A moment of seething silence in which Robin could sense Lennie gathering herself. She put her hand out – Don’t – but it was too late. ‘Ade loves Mum,’ Lennie said, voice tight. ‘He asked her to marry him.’

‘Len, it’s okay. You don’t—’

‘But it’s true . You were the one who said no so even if you had a fight, it doesn’t change that, does it?’

‘He asked you to marry him?’ Christine was staring. ‘And you said no ? For god’s sake, why ?’

‘Because I couldn’t … I just didn’t …’

‘Oh, you,’ her mother cried, ‘you, you, you. What about anyone else? What about poor Elena? Do you ever give her a second’s thought in all this, when you’re going around acting like you’re—’

‘What? How could you even—’

‘Robin – be quiet. Christine.’ Dennis had his hands out to the sides, boxing-ref style.

Her mother closed her eyes against the cruelty of the world, and the burden it had put upon her.

‘I’m fine, Gran,’ Lennie said. ‘Honestly.’

A hiatus, this time ended by Natalie. ‘So how long will you be here then? Your dad said you’re going to work for Maggie Hammond. That doesn’t mean you’re going to stay , does it?’

‘No.’ Please fucking god . ‘Maggie’s got a lot on so I’m going to help her until I straighten things out at the Met.’

‘Doesn’t she work for the council?’

‘She’s self-employed, they’re just one of her clients. It’s not just benefit fraud; there’s suspect insurance claims and—’

‘From Homicide Command in London to catching scroungers on the sick in Sparkhill,’ crowed Luke. ‘How the mighty have fallen.’

‘Luke, for the last time,’ said Dennis.

Cheeks flaming, Robin stood up. Blood pulsed in the backs of her hands. ‘Better to have fallen than to never even have tried to stand on your own two feet. You …’ The swirl of words and arguments and fury bottlenecked in her throat – she couldn’t choke them out. ‘You’re pathetic,’ she managed. ‘Just …’ She remembered Lennie. ‘Bugger off.’

She swung out of the room and took the stairs two at a time, her mother jabbering away behind her, a diatribe unchanged in twenty years: ‘ I won’t have that language in this house; this is my home ; I won’t have her behaving like this, Dennis; I just won’t. ’

Robin slammed the bedroom door as she’d done a thousand times before, the wall shuddering as it always had. Sudden silence – after a few seconds she could hear herself breathing. She looked around and felt time judder to a stop.

Apart from the boxes behind the door, which Josh had sent the factory’s van to collect from London last week, the room was unchanged since the day she’d packed her bags for university sixteen years earlier. The same blue gingham curtains, chosen by Christine as gender-neutral and successfully, to be fair, given that she and Luke had both hated them; the same pale blue carpet with – yes – the old stain where she’d dropped a leaky ballpoint and deliberately left it. Free-standing wardrobe in white vinyl veneer, the side that abutted the tiny desk still covered with her brother’s Villa stickers circa 1994 and her own picture of Robert Smith in his heyday, all leather jacket and Scissorhands hair.

A vibration in her back pocket. Gid? She’d texted him from Warwick Services, not because she expected anything new today – he wouldn’t be at work; he’d be home with Efie and the boys watching football, cooking, regrouting the bathroom – but for morale, the feeling that on this shittiest of days she still had a line back. Hope.

Not Gid but Corinna: How’s it going over there? What’s the body count?

She thumbed a reply: Nil – for now. Waiting til Amazon deliver acid for bath.

Seconds later, Good thinking. Booze/takeaway/debrief at ours Tues eve? Tell Len Peter has new Xbox game he’s dying to show her.

Wilco and YES. Feed me gin. By the pint.

She slid the phone back into her pocket feeling fractionally better. Corinna the human night-light. When she’d come down to London last month, Robin’d gone to meet her at Marylebone. She’d looked like a beacon as she’d stalked down the platform in her tangerine canvas coat with its fern-print pattern. Black polo neck, indigo skinny jeans tucked into shiny black knee boots – even Rin’s hair had been kinetic that day, cut into a new bob that seemed in perpetual motion.

Len had had a sleepover at her friend Olivia’s house, and so they’d got hammered, absolutely wasted, Robin swinging between rage, incredulity and grief, Rin listening, matching her drink for drink. The next day, they’d staggered up the road like Mick and Keith and eaten their way through spring rolls and meatballs and Vietnamese curry in an effort to staunch the nausea. Afterwards Corinna had done her thing, advising and problem-solving in a way that, coming from anyone else, would have driven Robin round the effing twist. ‘You’ve started looking for your own place?’ she’d said.

‘Online, yeah.’

‘Want me to help? I can while away a dull hour at work on Rightmove.’

‘It’ll have to wait for a couple of months.’

‘Why?’

‘No deposit.’

Corinna had frowned. ‘What do they ask for, a month’s rent? Or a month and a half? Can you take it out of savings? It’s worth it, isn’t it, even if there’s a penalty for early withdrawal?’

‘If it was just a question of taking it out of savings, do you think I’d be moving back? I’m flattered you think I even have a savings account – how long have you known me?’ She’d watched it dawn on Rin that she wasn’t joking, then the volley of silent questions: hadn’t she had a steady job for years? A salary, not massive but solid? ‘My rent here’s a ton,’ she said, ‘and Lennie’s school, even with the scholarship. Then there’ll be a lot of other stuff – you know, moving. A storage locker, maybe.’

‘How much will that cost?’

‘Also, I had some parking tickets.’ She’d hesitated. ‘Which I hadn’t paid, so they’d doubled. Twice. And then there’s the credit cards …’

‘Robin!’

‘I know, I know, I’m an idiot – tell me something I don’t know. The lottery numbers, preferably.’

‘Can I lend it to you? No, don’t get funny, I’d like to. I’ll even charge you interest if it would make you feel better.’

‘No. Thanks but no. I got myself into this mess, I’ll get myself out of it. What I really need you to do is rewind the clock. Make me nineteen again, will you, so I haven’t screwed up my life yet.’

‘You haven’t.’

‘It’s different this time.’ As she said the words, she’d felt them settle on her shoulders like a lead poncho. ‘I haven’t lost my job before, have I? We know I’m relationship poison but I’ve always been able to count on the rest. Work.’

‘You managed before.’ Subtly, Corinna had tipped her head at the next table where a man of about forty moved an expensive-looking pram back and forth with his foot. Going by his wife’s hollow eyes and limp hair, Robin had guessed their baby was weeks old, even days, this one of their first tentative forays back out into the world. Corinna had done that for her, too, back then, broken her circuit between the crib, the changing table and her thesis, and taken her out, to places like this, to the park, a pub by the river. On the surface, the world had looked exactly the same but for her, it had been reconfigured, fundamentally changed. A bomb had gone off in her life, she’d thought, and no one except Corinna had heard a thing.