A leaflet inviting the people of Shawford to come to a town meeting about Budgetfood’s proposed withdrawal, explaining that without this industry the town would die. It would simply die.
But Budgetfood had enough workers coming up through the patty line. It wasn’t economically viable to stay in a place where they had to pay national minimum wage. Cheap food came at a price, after all.
He searched the house by the failing light, and didn’t find anything interesting.
By the time he finished, he was working by the light of the torch on his mobile phone, SIM card in his pocket.
There was no electricity. No lights shone in the streets.
He let himself out the way he’d come in, and wandered a few roads over until he came to the house where once he’d been a child, almost the twin of Dani’s, and finding the front door locked, went round the back, and finding that locked too, broke the glass panel above the handle and let himself in.
Chapter 44
There had been a day his mother phoned.
“I’m selling the house and moving to Dorchester.”
“You’re… why Dorchester?”
“A job. I’ve got a job there, I’m going to be a care assistant.”
“You’ve never cared for—”
“A care assistant—the pay is £8.20 an hour I will look after the old women and I will help them shower and use the bathroom and eat and…”
“Mum I’m not sure that it’s such a—”
“And I’ll start again. I’ll start again in Dorchester.”
“Where is Dorchester? Is this really what you—”
“I’ll start again. You should think about what that means. I want you to remember this. It’s never too late to start again.”
When he became Theo, he only ever called her on a pay-as-you-go mobile phone, and never from the same place twice.
“Hi, Mum, how are you?”
“Oh. You know. It’s all pretty grim.”
Said affably, without much interest. Things are bad. They’ve been bad a while. Why would you bother asking?
“Hi, Mum, how are you?”
“Well my back’s given out.”
“How are you?”
“My wages have been cut and I’m very lonely. You know.”
“How are—”
“I don’t know why you bother to ask me that, what do you think I’m going to say, that it’s all puppies and roses?”
“What do you want me to say instead? What else is there?”
Their conversations became shorter, except for sometimes when she explained about how someone had said something about something else that she thought was stupid. She never asked how he was. She never knew that he was called Theo. She never called him and after a while…
He thought that if he called her, she’d be grateful to speak to him, and they’d be happy for a few minutes.
After a while, he thought that she might be dead.
There was nothing malicious in thinking this. She needed to be someone else. When his father was taken away, so went the woman she had been, leaving only a body behind. He needed to be someone else too; in that they understood each other perfectly.
There was probably a bit of love left, somewhere. It simply hadn’t been a priority for either of them.
An empty house in a silent town.
The furniture gone, every room seemed bigger, the windows smaller, looking out on to something less exciting than he’d remembered.
There was a smell of damp. Someone had ripped out the boiler and left the pipes wide open, but the gas and electricity had stopped a long time ago, and in the living room there was still that mark on the wall where he’d once thrown a plate and it had dented the plaster. He couldn’t remember why he’d been angry at the time.
He lay on his back on the place where his bed had been, stretched out across the floor, and studied the ceiling. Constellations shone luminous green-yellow above, glow stars bought in packets of twenty-five which he’d meticulously pressed into the shape of the galaxy above his head, and, not knowing what to do with the rockets and UFOs that came with them, added some space battles too, fleets roaring across the universe in endless pursuit.
His phone beeped, battery getting low.
He turned off the torch and lay a while longer.
Time is…
When he left home to go to university he couldn’t wait, it was the most important thing, he was stifled by everything to do with…
…and he didn’t just leave home, he left his father’s crime, his mother’s… whatever his mother was…
He left Dani’s despair and the taste of over-salted microwave meals, you could get ten for £2 on a Friday when they had their reject sale it was
And now that he is back
In this place you cannot hear the sea, but there is still a memory of something that might have been contentment.
The man called Theo thinks that tomorrow, when he leaves, he will not remember the thoughts that now run through his mind, glue him to this spot.
And the man called Theo remembers the day he put his father’s name into the Criminal Audit Office’s system, to see if he was still alive, still on the patty line, maybe even up for parole.
He wasn’t. He was dead in an unmarked grave behind the prison after a spill in which two chemicals shouldn’t have mixed, a fire that gutted B Wing of HMP Elmsley by Dazzling Beauty and Skincare. Seventeen people died in the blaze, and Theo hadn’t heard about it, and four weeks later they reopened for business. The prisoners on B Wing made jewellery, plastic gems and studs, barbells and hoops. His dad, before he burned alive, had specialised in vaginal gems. Theo hadn’t realised there were such things.
And the man called Theo thinks that there are some wading birds which can stand motionless on one leg in a river for over…
And the man called Theo thinks that time is…
Is not…
Is…
…getting harder and harder to keep track of, as time goes by.
A knocking on the door.
Theo jerked awake, listened, waited for it to go away.
The knocking came again.
It didn’t seem urgent. There was no breaking of glass, howling at the night.
Three knocks, then waiting, then three knocks again.
He went downstairs, holding the phone like a weapon, a thing to smash into faces. A figure against the half-moonlight framed in the front door’s frosted glass. He undid the lock from the inside, opened the door on the chain, just like his mum had taught him.
“Yes?”
“Are you Theo? Dani sent me.”
Chapter 45
The girl was no older than eighteen, and sat cross-legged on the floor eating cheese and onion crisps from a bag in her pocket. Theo sat opposite her. Between them a USB stick.
Around mouthfuls of potato wafer: “I knew Dani from the prison, she was nice you know? She knew what she wanted—you don’t get many people what know what they want and that’s something that inspired me, you know, like real inspired. I’d like to know what that’s like, I mean, being certain about things, like who I am and what I think and what I’m worth because that’s the first step—you got to know—and Dani did. I don’t know shit. That’s what everyone said,” a huge gap-toothed grin, another fistful of crunch, it’s funny this, isn’t it? Everyone says she doesn’t know shit and that’s a really funny joke, look, trust me, just because you weren’t there you don’t understand and so…
“I got out a few months ago. Parole company sponsored me, like with Dani, but they said I was pretty that I could make a few extra quid if I slept with the old men and the old ladies and that. And I said no, fuck that, because I’m trying to know myself and I don’t think that’s the sort of thing I’d do, and Dani told me that I shouldn’t, she said that it would be…