“That’s better,” he said.
He leaned over Sue and kissed her. Her forehead was clammy, sour.
The doctor spoke about the baby’s heart. Billy kept on smiling. It was as if he were being photographed. Not just once, though. Again and again.
During the days that followed — and they were long days, the longest he had ever known — he thought that it was all his fault. There was something not quite right about him. A lack of clarity or definition. He locked the bathroom door and put his face close to the mirror. He studied himself for minutes on end, trying to catch a glimpse of it. The weakness, the ugliness. The fatal flaw. It must always have been there, he thought. Other people had seen it, perhaps. If they had, they’d said nothing: it wasn’t the kind of thing you could talk about. It had taken the birth of a child to establish it beyond all doubt. To bring it out into the open.
After a while, though, the blame spread sideways, and he began to see the damaged baby as a verdict on their marriage. They couldn’t have been intended for each other. They had made a terrible mistake. They’d flown in the face of nature. The sense of familiarity that he had felt at the outset had been a trick after all, a trap, and he had walked right into it, fool that he was. Or perhaps he was being punished for all the things that he had done and hadn’t done…He would wake in the night, and the heat coming off him was unbelievable. On his side of the bed, the sheets would be soaked through.
It was Sue who put an end to these morbid imaginings. Not that she said anything. No, it was all in her manner, her behaviour: the way she knuckled down. We’ve been chosen to look after this little girl, she seemed to be telling him, so we might as well get on with it. This was a side of Sue he hadn’t seen before, this practicality, this grit. Full of admiration, humbled by her, in fact, he began to try and follow her example. Still, there were times when he wished it was just a bad dream and he could wake up and it would all be over. No baby — or a different baby. A baby that was ordinary, not special. Oh Billy, Billy, he would whisper to himself in some damp church.
During this time, he became more than usually sensitive to his surroundings, and everything he noticed appeared to be commenting on his predicament, not only songs on the radio, but newspaper headlines, fragments of overheard conversation, even the names of racehorses. It was, ironically, like being in love. Once, scrawled on a wall in a nightclub toilet, he saw a piece of graffiti that said simply lamentations 3:7. Lamentations — well, that, too, was obviously for him. The word was enough in itself, but when he got home he couldn’t resist looking up the reference. He hath fenced me about, that I cannot go forth; he hath made my chain heavy.
He was determined not to leave, though. He didn’t want to do what his father had done, even if it was in his blood. He had felt the urge, not in the delivery room, but on the road outside the hospital. To run, and keep on running. To hide. To die, even. Every muscle in his body braced for flight. But he remembered the promises that he had made. For better or for worse.
For worse, he thought.
He had drawn the short straw. The chickens had come home to roost. It was a bitter pill to swallow. There were a hundred little phrases to describe him now, and none of them were cheerful.
What he dreaded most were visitors. The way they went all soft and holy when they saw the child. Fake soft, though. Fake holy. And the way they looked at him — with sympathy, or with a kind of heartiness, as if they wanted to jolly him along. He knew it was difficult for them, but he just couldn’t take it. He told black jokes — the blacker, the better — and watched their body language change. They weren’t sure whether to laugh or disapprove. It’s all right for you, he wanted to shout, his spit landing on their faces. You don’t have to live with it.
What a relief when Neil Batty came to stay. Neil waited until Sue had left the room, then he turned to Billy and said, “Well, this is a right fucking mess, isn’t it?” He could have hugged Neil for that. Neil who had joined the force at the same time as he had. Neil who had been his best man the year before…
It was a mess, and it would probably get messier. It wasn’t going to go away, that was for sure.
And that was all he knew, when it came down to it.
Those were the facts.
Turning down the corridor that led to the mortuary, he thought of the crystals Sue had given him. He reached into his breast pocket and took out the pale-blue stone. It would connect him with the purest part of himself, Sue had said, but how much purity did he have in him after everything that he had been through?
16
When Billy pressed the mortuary bell, Fowler opened the door and then looked past him, into the corridor, as if he expected Billy to have brought his wife with him.
“Everything all right?” he said.
Billy nodded. “Everything’s fine.”
“You took your time.”
“Sorry. Nothing I could do.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Fowler said. “She wasn’t any trouble.”
Billy suspected that this line had been rehearsed, but he gave Fowler the obligatory smile. To most people, a bobby’s sense of humour would seem tasteless, if not actually sick, but then most people didn’t have to cope with what bobbies had to cope with. Billy thought of the time Neil gave the kiss of life to a man who had been thrown through a windscreen. Thanks to Neil, the man survived, though his entire face had to be reconstructed. Neil won a commendation from the Chief Superintendent, and his name appeared in the local paper. He didn’t make a big song and dance about it. In fact, he only mentioned it once, and that was later that night, in the equipment room. “I don’t know much about that bloke,” Neil said, “but I can tell you one thing: he’d had an Indian.” Neil paused to allow the laughter to die down. “Chicken Madras, I think it was.” A sense of humour. You wouldn’t be able to carry on without one. It’s how you protect yourself.
Taking over as loggist, Billy saw that he’d been gone for more than half an hour. Fowler had been right to draw his attention to it. He would have to tell Sue not to turn up like that again. It made him look unprofessional. It was humiliating too.
“Well,” Fowler said, “back to those corridors.”
“Thanks very much for filling in,” Billy said. “I appreciate it.”
Fowler looked at his feet and nodded, then he lifted his head again and gave Billy a lopsided grin.
When the constable had left, Billy sat down at the table. It was still almost two hours until his first real break, but he didn’t feel like doing any paperwork. He poured himself another coffee. Half a cup. The lights on the ceiling gave off a faint mechanical sound, somewhere between a whine and a buzz, and a regular but spaced-out beep-beep-beep was coming from the coroner’s office, which meant that Fowler had failed to answer the phone, and somebody had left a message. The noise didn’t irritate Billy, as his young blonde colleague had assumed it would; if anything, he found it comforting, like a heartbeat, a vital sign. Sue would be on the A14 by now, he thought. The road would be quiet. Just the occasional lorry heading east to catch the night ferry.
He took out his mobile. If he sent Sue a text, it would seal the rare good note on which they had parted. Hope u got home safely, he wrote. Lets have b/fast 2gether. Billyx. He hoped she had finally resigned herself to the fact that he had gone to work, as ludicrous as that sounded. After all, he was a policeman; he couldn’t pick and choose between assignments. And certainly, when they sat side by side at the picnic table, she had seemed contrite, realising, perhaps, that she had overstepped the mark. But these recent, wild mood-swings troubled him. Following the birth of Emma, she had shown such courage, such application, and he had drawn strength from her example. He’d come to rely on her to keep things stable. Now, though, he wasn’t sure if she was so reliable…