Yeni and Margie were fast asleep in the house, and I was trying hard not to come up here and spend the tail hours of the evening speculating about everything, typing up five-odd pages that end on a self-pitying note, and then slink off to bed for a crappy sleep. I told myself I was going out for a smoking session in the car, but really I knew it was nothing of the kind. I’m smoking properly again, getting through about ten a day, and I can feel my heart rate rising every time I inhale, my bronchioles getting itchy and irritated, my lung capacity diminishing. It feels good.
Driving through the town at midnight, through the parallel universe that is pub closing time. All the newsagents had cloyingly alliterative posters, tattered and smudged from a day of windy rain: SEXY DR. SUSIE’S SWINGING SECRETS. I fret about smoking ten cigarettes a day and being slightly overweight at twenty-nine; the town was full of drunk, fat, laughing people smoking casually as they walked down the streets, stopping at late-night shops to buy fatsnax and yet more cigarettes. Half of them didn’t even have enough clothes on for the weather. The young women especially, walking along with their tits hanging out and skirts up their arses. Susie said they are dressing to impress one another, but I don’t think any heterosexual man would ever believe that. I’m not going to let Margie out until she’s twenty-five. She can wear what she likes, but she’s staying home with me.
The colors at night are yellow and blue and gray. Uplit faces are slow, drunk. People move gracelessly, laugh loudly, fall languorously. Hot chips spill onto litter-strewn streets, crying women hail cabs, and angry men go after them (Angela, you stupid bitch, Angela, fucking come back here). The red eyes of the car in front leave crusty, bloody trails in the yellow dark.
I cruised through the town, not going anywhere really, not consciously, until I found myself far out on the south side, on the council estate. It’s built on the edge of a deep wood, with ugly concrete cottages from the fifties lining broad streets and a badly broken-up road surface. I had to snake along, veering back and forth across the road to miss axle-shattering chasms. I only saw two or three other cars there.
Beyond low brick walls were bare little gardens, overlooked by bright windows with curtains. They had ornaments arranged on the silclass="underline" a china cat, a nasty vase with dusty plastic flowers jagging out of it, a ceramic flower basket. None of the front gardens had anything growing in them. Stevie Ray’s house had two small windows knocked into a much bigger one, but the surround wasn’t finished on it and the white PVC frame sat inside chipped and crumbling brick. A pile of bricks and loose rubble sat in the middle of the front garden. The lights were off.
I drove past Stevie’s house three, maybe four times before I pulled over just beyond it and stopped. I was so angry by this point I could have kicked his door in. I wanted to ask him how he could live with himself, did he think I was a wanker? Well, did he? I sat in the car, taking deep breaths so I wouldn’t be too angry, smoking a cigarette, which made me angry again.
I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Stevie Ray coming along the road toward me, back from a night in the pub. Next to him was a small blond woman, and I thought he’d got lucky. They were walking so close, smiling but chatting very little, it was a touching scene. I’d calmed down by this point and knew I’d have to work myself up into having a fight again, so I slid down in the seat, and as I watched, I realized that the woman looked familiar.
They turned into the garden. For a moment I worried that they’d notice my car. They could have, but at that moment the woman said something, flicking her finger toward the crap piled up in the front garden. The gesture was disapproving, but she dropped her shoulders in despair at the same time, as though she’d pointed it out a hundred times. Stevie didn’t say anything, but his back tensed guiltily. From that one gesture and response, I knew immediately that they were living together and had been for a long, long time.
Then Lara Orr took out her keys and opened Stevie Ray’s front door.
I was stubbing out my fifth cigarette, about to get out and knock on his door, when a rap at the window made me jump, the seatbelt yanking me back and hurting my shoulder. Stevie Ray was at my window, looking wary but curious. He was breathing frost, wearing stripy pajamas under a heavy woolen dressing gown and outdoor shoes on bare feet. I pressed the electronic button and Stevie reeled back as the window started and lowered. He’d been expecting me to punch him.
“Listen,” he said, talking fast and hanging on to the wall behind him with both hands, “I’m sorry, but a guy’s got to make a living. You’ve got everything- you wouldn’t understand. You’re clever and good-looking and you’re a doctor. You’ve got a healthy daughter-”
“You prick,” I said, brave inside my car. “My reputation’s ruined because of you. What a cheap thing to do, even for you. It was cheap.”
Stevie looked at the ground. “I needed the money,” he said. “I’m sorry. I am a prick.” He came closer, put a hand on the roof of the car, and drummed his fingers once, leaning down into the cab to speak. “Are you, um… d’you, um, want a cuppa?”
I looked up at him. He actually felt sorry for me. “Come away in and have a cup of tea with us,” he said, sotto voce, eyes serene. “There’s someone inside who wants to meet you.”
“Lara Orr?”
Stevie nodded, glowing at the mention of her name. “She’s been following you in the papers. She feels bad for you.”
I was genuinely touched. How deeply kind, I thought. How good women can be sometimes.
All promise of a spiritual connection was shattered when I saw inside their house. All the paper had been ripped off the walls in the hall, and someone had painted over the scrappy mess in the cloying peachy color of artificial limbs. The real shock was the undulating dirt floor. It was actual dirt, muddy, sandy dirt for growing things in, but, being December, the frost was through it. Someone had laid bits of cardboard box down, but the freezing damp hung in the narrow hallway. There had been floorboards once, that much was clear from the struts sticking out of the side of the wall about an inch above the ground level.
Stevie saw me looking around at the mess. “I’m doing, ahem, some renovations.”
The living-room floor was still intact. It was a steep step up from the hall and had a once-green carpet on the floor, now encrusted with dirt to the point where it was black and shiny at the doorway. Newspapers were spread over the floor to act as a protective cover. A midnight blue velvet settee with full ashtrays and plates and cups balanced on the arm stood just inside the doorway. A large television was precariously balanced on a red plastic child’s chair next to a big gas fire. Standing there in the cold muddy hall, looking up into the floating platform of the warm living room, I felt like a soldier on the Somme dreaming of his modest home.
Lara Orr hove into view wearing a nightie, a dressing gown to match Stevie’s, and a pair of low navy blue court shoes with fluffy yellow socks inside them. She’s petite, nervously thin, and unattractive. Her eyes are so small they make her seem almost inbred.
“Wit’s he doing here?” she snapped unpleasantly.
“I brought him in for a cup of tea.”
“Look at the mess you’ve made of the place,” she said, making it sound as if he’d done it all that evening. “I’m ashamed to have people in and you’re bringing folk in here…” She glanced at me, sphincter-mouthed. “It’s twelve at night. And we don’t even know him. Ye shouldnae invite folk in.”
“Lara, shut it. Away and make some tea,” said Stevie, affectionately.
“Naw,” said Lara, looking me up and down and relaxing slightly. “You make some tea.”