“Where?”
“Jesus Christ, girl! There!”
Michelle pushed two fingers against the top of the hinge, her thumb against the bottom.
“Okay, now budge over, give me room to get the screwdriver to it.”
She could hear his breathing clearly, loud and slightly ragged beneath his shirt. He hated doing jobs like this.
“Right. Whatever you do, don’t let go. Hold it firm. Push.”
There was a shout, sudden and loud, from inside the house and she knew that Karl had fallen and hurt himself.
Gary sensed her move and stopped it. “I’ll be done in a minute. Hang on.”
“It’s Karl, he …”
“I said bloody hang on!”
Gary gave a final turn and the screw splintered sideways through the wood of the frame, jerking the screwdriver from his hand. The hinge fell away from Michelle’s fingers and the whole door slid sharply outwards, wrenching the bottom hinge away with it.
“Fuck!” Gary yelled. “Sodding bastard fuck!”
“Gary!” Michelle called. “Don’t.”
From somewhere, blood seemed to be running between her fingers, collecting inside her hand.
Karl was standing close by the doorway, fists jammed against his eyes, mouth widening through a succession of screams.
“Fuck!” Gary swore again, kicking at the frame. “And you,” he said, grabbing Karl by both arms and lifting him into the air. “You want something to bloody cry about!” He dropped his son towards the floor and before he could land, had cracked his hand, hard as he could, back across Karl’s face.
Three
“Crying out for it, she was?
Meal time in the canteen and Divine, relieved from his duties at the hospital, was telling Kevin Naylor about his encounter with Staff Nurse Bruton over the drugs trolley. A year or so back, Naylor would have been impressed; now his expression was, to put it mildly, skeptical.
“No, she was. Straight up.”
“Told you, did she?” Naylor asked. “I mean, you know, came right out and said it?”
Divine dipped one of his chips into the pool of brown sauce spreading across his plate. “Don’t need to say, do they? Know what’s what, you can tell.” He pointed his fork across at Naylor, sprinkling the table with sauce. “Lot of your problem, you and Debbie …”
“Debbie and I don’t have a problem.”
“For now, maybe.”
“We don’t have a problem.” Naylor’s voice getting louder, attracting attention.
“All I’m saying,” Divine went on blithely, spearing another chip, “all the evidence shows, you know bog all about bloody women.”
“Whereas you,” Lynn Kellogg leaned over from the next table, “expert by now, aren’t you, Mark?”
Sarcastic cow! Divine thought. “Don’t believe me,” he said, “catch me in action, this do tonight. The man who made pulling an art form.”
“I can’t wait!”
“No?” Divine forked up a piece of meat pie. “Well, shame but you just might have to. I mean, I’d like to help out, but there’s just so many others in line before you.”
Lynn pushed back her plate and stood up. “What do I have to do to keep it that way? Wear a cross round my neck? Eat garlic?”
Divine gave her a swift appraisal. “No need. Just keep looking the way you do.”
He leaned back and winked across at Naylor, as Lynn walked away, muffled laughter from some of the other officers flushing her face.
“You didn’t need to say that,” Kevin Naylor said quietly.
“Nobody asked her to stick her nose in. Any road, it’s no more’n true. I mean, would you fancy it? Be honest.”
Naylor looked back down at his plate and made no reply.
“That prick,” Lynn said to herself on the stairs, “knows as much about women as the average five-year-old.” She remembered him picking a magazine off her desk once, attention drawn by blonde hair and bright red lips and the headline, Shere Hite and the Clitoral Tendency. Divine had thought they were a new pop group.
Gary James had been waiting close to two hours and there were still five people in front of him, two of them Pakis. Turn a place over to them and the next thing it’d be swarming, aunts and uncles, sisters and cousins, floor to ceiling like bugs. He’d seen it happen. Next to them, this couple lolling all over one another, tongues in each other’s ears half the time, looked as though they should still be at school, not in the bloody Housing Office. Tattoos all up their shoulders and necks, her with enough little rings in her nose to open a shop; bloke with his hair twisted round like some Rasta, though he was white as Gary himself. Down the row from Gary there was this West Indian woman the size of a sodding house herself, three kids clinging to her and another one on the way.
Jesus! Gary didn’t have a watch and the clock on the waiting room wall had been at twenty-five past seven the past three times he’d been there.
“Hey, mate,” he said, tapping the nearest Paki on the shoulder, then pointing to his own wrist in case the bloke didn’t understand. “What time you got?”
“Very nearly a quarter to four,” the man said politely and smiled.
Don’t smile at me, you smarmy bastard, Gary thought as he sat back down, save that for when you get in there. And then, Christ, that’s nearly three hours, never mind two.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, you!” He pulled one of the metal-frame chairs out of line and pushed it hard towards the wall. “Think I’m going to sit here all bloody day? I want to see somebody and I want to see them bloody now!”
“Sir,” the receptionist said. “Sir, if you’ll just go back to your seat, you’ll be seen as soon as possible.” All the while her fingers moving towards the panic button underneath the counter top.
Resnick had gone to talk to Mavis Alderney himself. Mavis thankful for the chance to catch a fag out back from the laundry off Trent Boulevard where she worked.
It had been Mavis who had come close to being sent flying by two youths that morning. “Arse over tip,” was how she put it. “Someone wants to get hold of the like of them and give them a good thrashing. Well, don’t you think? Should’ve been done to ‘em long time back. Then happen they’d not be the way they are now.”
Resnick had grunted something noncommittal and pressed for her to be more specific with her descriptions. “A pair of them tearaways, you know, them boots and jeans, no respect for anyone, not even themselves,” wasn’t quite going to do it.
Now he was in the market, upstairs in the Victoria Centre, all the seats around the Italian coffee stall taken and having to stand to drink his espresso, listening to an animated discussion about why both the city’s soccer teams were languishing near the bottom of their respective leagues.
“Ask me,” someone said, “best thing could happen, bloody managers ship ’emselves either side of Trent, swop jobs.”
“Now you’re talking rubbish, man.”
“Well, they couldn’t do a lot worse.”
“No,” put in somebody else, “I’ll tell you what. Best present they could have, both clubs. Christmas morning, chairmen of directors gets ’em both, Cloughie and Warnock on the phone, wishes them a Merry Christmas and tells them they’re both sacked.”
“What? They’ll not sack Cloughie, they’d never dare. They’d have a full-scale bloody riot on their hands.”
“Aye, maybe. But not as much as if they go down.”
Resnick smiled and reached between two of the men, setting his cup and saucer back on the counter. On his way out of the market he’d buy a little Polish sausage to go with his duck, a chunk of Gruyere and some Blue Stilton, a good slice of apple strudel and some sour cream to take the place of a Christmas pudding.
Down below, crowds were pushing their way from store to store and last-minute shoplifting was in full swing. Even more people than usual were gathered around the Emmett clock, holding up small children to see the fantastic metal animals revolve and laugh with wonder as streams of water splashed off its gilded petals as they opened. Again, again, again.