“Do you love me, Billy?”
Billy sighed. “Is that what you drove out here for?” Leaning forwards, with his elbows on his knees, he looked straight ahead. He wasn’t sure he had the energy for this. “For God’s sake, Sue, I’m working.”
“I was worried,” she said. “I don’t know. I just got worried.” Lines appeared on her forehead. “Will we be all right, do you think?”
His voice softened a little. “Of course we will.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes it seems so difficult.”
“I know,” he said. “I know it does.”
“Maybe we could go away for a bit.”
“You mean a holiday?”
“We could get a ferry over to Holland. We could drive around like we used to — stay in places…”
He lifted his head again and looked at the silver birches, the bark peeling back in delicate scrolls to reveal dark patches underneath. We could drive around. With Emma, though? In late November? Sue’s wishes were becoming more and more fanciful. It was as if, in having failed to take her to India or Thailand when she was young, in having persuaded her into a different life, one that was more pedestrian, he had accrued a debt. The tasks she set him now would be harder to fulfil — and yet he owed it to her, didn’t he, to try?
“I’ll be home in the morning,” he said. “We’ll talk about it then.”
Sue was reaching into her pocket. “I nearly forgot.” She took out a black stone on a thin leather cord and passed it to him. He held it in the palm of his hand. The stone gave off a dull, dark gleam, but seemed oddly difficult to see. Like a piece of the night itself. “It’s jet,” she said. “It will protect you.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Wear it. You can put it round your neck, under your uniform.” She smiled at him. “No one will know it’s there.”
“All right.” He passed the cord over his head.
“It doesn’t absorb the bad things,” Sue said, “it repels them. It doesn’t let them get too close.”
“OK,” he said.
As he tucked the stone down inside his collar, he was reminded of something he had read about the early years of the woman’s imprisonment, in Holloway. Apparently, the guards used to argue over who was going to take her meals in to her. No one wanted to do it. They didn’t like the idea of being near her. They weren’t physically afraid of her; the fear was spiritual.
“One more thing.” Sue brought a second stone out of her pocket. “You’ll need to carry this as well.”
He took it from her. It was lighter in colour, and much smoother. More pleasing. “What’s this one?”
“Celestine. It complements the jet. It will put you in touch with the purest part of yourself.”
He slipped the crystal into his breast pocket. “I hope you haven’t got any more,” he said. “I’ll never be able to get up off this bench otherwise.”
“No,” she said, almost jaunty now, “that’s it.”
He checked his watch. “You should get back, or Jan will worry.” He took his mobile out. “Why don’t you give her a call and let her know you’re on your way?” Punching in the number, he handed her the phone. The moment she said, “Jan? It’s me,” he stopped listening.
The wind picked up; trees shifted overhead. He thought about the guards, and how they were believed, at times, to have drawn lots outside the woman’s cell. He wondered what they’d used. Matches, perhaps — or keys. Yes, keys. And the tray set down on the floor, the food going cold…Had the woman known what effect she’d had on those around her? What would it be like to know that?
Once Sue had finished with the phone, he walked her back to Janet’s car. Even in the short time it had been standing there, condensation had formed on all the windows, and he went round with a packet of tissues, making sure that Sue would be able to see out. Ever since her accident, he worried when she got behind the wheel. She had crashed into the playground wall at Emma’s school, knocking down a twenty-foot section, the car rolling over and then sliding, upside-down, on to the road again. Only when he saw the car the next day, in the scrapyard, its roof savagely gouged and crushed almost to the level of the steering-column, did he realise how lucky she had been, not just to have escaped uninjured, but to have survived at all.
“Take care on the road,” Billy said. “I should be home around eight.”
She looked up at him through the half-open window, her lips black in the dim light. “Sorry to be such a nuisance,” she said, then her face seemed to clear and she gave him a mischievous grin. “At least I can still surprise you.”
“I love you,” he said. “Drive carefully.”
He watched the tail-lights until they disappeared behind the trees, then started back towards the hospital. He had been firm with her. At the same time, he had tried to tell her what she needed to hear, and she had gone away happier. But he should take her somewhere. She had a birthday coming up. Maybe then.
Will we be all right?
There are things you don’t forget. You can’t wipe them out, or pretend they never happened. You wish you could, though. God, how you wish you could. Some of them seem fairly innocuous, and yet they stick — Newman’s jibe about him lacking commitment, for instance — but others take place at the very centre of your life and alter every atom, every thought. Like the spring evening when he held his baby daughter’s hand for the first time.
Looking at her tiny red palm, he noticed a line that ran across it from one side to the other. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but he knew enough to suspect it wasn’t normal. Then the doctor told them.
A slow smile spread over Sue’s face. “Oh, that’s a shame,” she murmured. “What a shame.”
Almost before he was aware of it, Billy had risen to his feet and turned away. How can you be so fucking stupid? Sue, he meant. And for a moment he was afraid that he had said the words out loud. Just to have had the thought was shocking enough, though, and he stared blindly into the corner of the room. He was feeling so many things at once. Most of all, he wanted desperately to be somewhere else. A pub where no one would talk to him, or even realise that he was there. A pub where he wasn’t a regular.
“Billy?” The doctor laid a hand on his shoulder.
The air blurring around him, Billy muttered “toilet,” then he left the room.
But he hurried straight past the toilet and down the stairs. One flight, then another, legs chattering like teeth. A wonder he could walk at all. He didn’t stop until he reached the road outside the hospital. He stood on the kerb; a cold wind cut through his shirt. April the 4th. He looked at the brown sky and saw a plane up there, bits of cloud sucked into its landing lights like flung rags. He could hear the uneven rumble of the engines. “Don’t let this happen,” he was whispering to himself. “Oh God, don’t let it happen.”
He was behaving as if it were all just a remote possibility. He was acting as though he had a choice. But the world had already made up its mind. Here. This is yours. He was thirty-seven, almost thirty-eight. Sue was thirty. They’d been trying to have a baby for years.
A bus went past, its wheels surging through a deep puddle. Dirty water splashed across his trousers. Standing at the edge of the main road, he watched the water dripping off him and began to laugh.
When he walked back into the delivery room, he made sure there was a smile on his face.