As Lynn fell fast against his legs, the body tore and tipped and spilled against her. His feet and hands were bony and cold and hard and when his eyes met hers they smiled.
She screamed herself awake. The sheet and pillow were soaked. Lynn stripped them from the bed and dropped them to the floor beside the blanket and her clothes. For several moments she stood with her head bent towards her knees, steadying her breath. It was twenty-five past three. Against all her judgment, what she wanted most of all was to phone home, make sure her father was all right. She pulled on her dressing gown and tied it tight, filled the kettle and switched it on, brought a towel from the bathroom and vigorously rubbed at her hair.
If anything had happened, her mother would have rung her. And she had worries enough already, without picking up the pieces of Lynn’s dreams.
Lynn could remember her, inevitable apron smudged with flour, sitting on the side of the narrow bed Lynn had shared with a family of somewhat disabled dolls and a ragged panda, patting her hand and shushing, “Just a dream, my petal. All it was, a silly old dream.”
Lynn had forgotten to buy any milk on the way home and so she drank half a cup of tea, black, before going back into the bathroom and standing under the shower. It was only then, hot water cascading from her head and shoulders, that she began to cry.
Worried about the lack of progress over Nancy Phelan, worried by the unfamiliar drawn expression he had noted on Lynn Kellogg’s face, the dark shadows beneath her eyes, worried by his seemingly unresolvable predicament over New Year’s Eve, Resnick had gone to bed convinced that he would never be able to sleep and had slept like the proverbial log. It had taken Dizzy’s insistence to spin him awake, the cat’s paws working rhythmically into his pillow with something close to desperation. It was a few minutes short of six o’clock, but Resnick felt as if he had overslept, head coddled in cotton wool.
Dizzy waited outside the bathroom while Resnick showered, sharpening his claws against the frame of the door. The other cats were in the kitchen, waiting to greet him, Pepper purring with anticipation from inside an old colander he had commandeered as his favored sleeping quarters.
Coffee brewing, cat food distributed into colored bowls, Resnick concentrated on layering alternate slices of smoked ham and Jarlsberg on to half-toasted rye bread. He was adding a touch of Dijon mustard when Lynn phoned, saying she needed to talk.
“Something about Gary James?” Resnick asked.
“No, it’s personal,” she said.
“All right,” Resnick said, “give me half an hour.”
He pressed the pieces of toast together into a sandwich and cut them in two, poured the coffee, took both back upstairs to finish getting dressed. Before leaving the house, he called Millington at home.
“Graham, wasn’t sure if I’d catch you.”
“Only just.” Millington had been sitting at the circular table in the kitchen, chewing his way through an assortment of bran and wheat-germ that was about as appealing as the floor of his old nan’s budgie’s cage.
“At your age, Graham,” his wife insisted, “it doesn’t pay to take chances. You have to keep your arteries open.” She’d been browsing through those leaflets she brought back from the well-woman clinic again, Millington had thought.
“Looks like I shall be a few minutes late,” Resnick said. “Hold the fort for me, will you?”
Millington, of course, was only too pleased. Much of his sergeant’s life, Resnick suspected, was spent waiting for some unforeseen and appalling accident to befall his superiors. At which time, only he, Graham Millington, mind alert, shoes buffed, and hair gleaming, would be ready to step into the breech. His moment of glory. What was it the dance director said to little Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street? “You’re coming out of that dressing room a nobody, but you’re coming back a star.”
The postman was at the end of the drive when Resnick left, sorting through a vast bundle of mail.
“Not all for me, I hope?” Resnick said, scarcely breaking his stride.
The postman shook his head. “Just the usual. Readers’ Digest, Halifax, the AA, and free garlic bread if you order one large or two medium pizzas.”
Resnick raised a hand in thanks. Exactly the kind of postal worker there should be more of, sifted through the junk mail for you so all you had to do was transfer it directly to the bin.
Lynn was waiting for him at the door, had heard his footsteps, heavy across the courtyard and turned up the flame under the Italian coffee pot she had recently bought. The coffee you put, ground, into a small perforated container which stood over cold water in the bottom section; light the gas and not so many minutes later the water had somehow pumped up and there was your coffee, strong and black and ready to pour. In truth, she doubted she’d used it more than a few times since buying it in the autumn. She hoped the coffee was strong enough; she hoped it didn’t taste stewed.
“Good smell,” Resnick said as soon as he was inside.
“You want some toast? I’m going to have toast.”
“No, thanks,” looking for somewhere to put his coat, “I’ve eaten already.” And then, “All right, why not? Just one.”
“Here, give me that,” Lynn said, and hung his raincoat from one of the hooks just inside the door.
The radio was playing quietly in a corner of the room, not quite tuned. Trent-FM. “Let me turn that off.”
“No, it’s okay.”
She switched it off anyway and Resnick mooched around the room while she was in the small kitchen, reading the titles of the books on the shelf, glancing at an old copy of the Mail, the back page with the headline, FOREST FOR THE DROP? Among the photographs above the fireplace was one of a happy Lynn, chubby and smiling, in her father’s arms. Five years old? The pictures of her former boyfriend, the cyclist, seemed to have pedaled off into the dustbin.
“Butter or marge?”
“Sorry?”
“On the toast, butter or …”
“Oh, butter.”
Resnick settled himself in the center of the two-seater settee, Lynn at an angle on a chair.
“How’s the coffee?”
“Fine.”
“Sure it’s strong enough?”
“Why don’t you tell me what’s worrying you, what’s happened?”
She told him about her dream. Neither spoke for a little while.
“You’re bound to be frightened,” he eventually said. “For yourself as well as for him. It’s a difficult time.”
Lynn pulled her legs towards her chest, wrapped her arms around her knees. “If it is cancer,” Resnick said, “what are his chances?”
“They won’t really say.”
“And treatment? Chemotherapy?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She was focusing on a spot on the side wall, anything rather than look at him directly. “They cut it out. As much as they can. He’ll probably have to have a colostomy. That’s a …”
“I know what it is.”
“I can’t imagine … he’ll never cope with that, he never will. He …”
“Better that than the other thing.”
“I don’t even know if that’s true.” Her knee banged against the chair as she got up. She wasn’t going to cry in front of him, she wasn’t. Fingers digging into the flesh of her hands, she stood by the small window, staring out.
“I remember,” Resnick went on, “when my father went into hospital. Trouble with his breathing, his lungs. Half a dozen stairs and he sounded like one of those old engines, winding down. He went into the City for tests, treatment, a rest. They gave him, I don’t know, some kind of antibiotics. Physiotherapy. I’d go in sometimes to visit, I might just have been over that way, you know, passing, and this woman would be there, white tunic and trousers, pleasant but serious, deadly serious. ‘Come on now, Mr. Resnick, we have to teach you to breathe.’ ‘What does she think I’ve been doing, Charlie, these past sixty years if it’s not breathing?’ he used to say as soon as she’d gone.” He sighed. “I suppose they did what they could, but he hadn’t made anything easy. Even as a kid, I can scarcely picture him without a cigarette in his hand.” Resnick looked across at her. “But they did what they could. Got him so he was able to come out of hospital, come home for another few months.”