He took a step backwards and pushed his hands into his pockets. ‘We’re not going to the pub,’ he said, ‘and that’s the end of it.’
‘But I’m thirsty —’
‘So you want me to buy you six more cans and watch you throwing up again. Is that it?’
She was looking at the ground. The wind moved her hair against her cheek; in the darkness of the car-park it seemed to have regained its natural colour.
‘I am thirsty, though,’ she said in a quiet voice.
He took her firmly by the arm and led her away from the pub. This time she didn’t resist.
‘You’re supposed to be helping me,’ she said.
He chose not to speak. Though he wasn’t thirsty, his throat felt dry.
‘All these things I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘you’re supposed to be explaining them to me …’
She was staring straight ahead, her face pale and glowing.
‘And afterwards,’ she said, ‘everything will make sense. Everything will be all right.’ She turned to look at him. ‘That’s why you’re here.’
He had to stop listening to her.
They walked along an unlit road until they reached a dual carriageway. Streetlamps stretched away in a long, lazy curve. The tall grey poles had stooping necks like creatures from another world, the slightly oval lights arranged in pairs like eyes. An unearthly landscape. And in the distance, above the trees, he could see some red lights, six in all. He felt the skin tighten at the back of his neck.
The bridge.
Glade was muttering again, words that had no meaning for him. He asked her how she felt. She didn’t answer. He hadn’t really expected her to. There was a sense in which they were both now talking to themselves. He wondered if this hadn’t been true of them all along.
You never came for me. I thought you’d come.
His mind drifted back to Jill, as if she was its natural resting-place. She had always doubted him, feeling she loved him more than he loved her. He remembered one of the first times they slept together and how she had touched the tattoo on his chest, lightly, with just her fingertips. She must have meant a lot to you. From his point of view, the tattoo looked like a number — 317537 — and he thought there was something fitting about that: his feelings for Leslie had, for a while, at least, imprisoned him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing in those days. Had one too many drinks, got a tattoo.’ He shook his head. Jill lay back against the pillows. If he had said yes, she would have been upset. Saying no, though, that upset her too, of course. He had married Leslie and now, a few years later, she meant nothing. He had shown Jill a flaw in his character — a lack of constancy, almost a fickleness; he had shown her what he was incapable of. And anyway, she didn’t believe him. There are certain women who always think they’re less than the woman who came before, and you can’t tell them any different. It’s in the eye of the beholder. Like beauty, or anorexia.
The day Jill was taken into the clinic for her abortion, Barker had walked along the promenade that looks out over Plymouth Sound. The sea lay below him, sluggish, pale-green. The sky was heaped with clouds the colour of charcoal and lead. It had rained earlier and, once, just for a few seconds, a shaft of sunlight reached from beneath the clouds and turned the wet path into a sheet of gleaming metal. Looking westwards, Barker was almost blinded. Down on the seafront he noticed a car parked at an angle to the pavement. Two teenage boys sat inside, sharing a cigarette. Music thudded from the open window. Closer to him, on the promenade, a man stood beside a wooden bench, a pair of binoculars dangling on a leather strap around his neck. Then the clouds covered the sun again and the promenade was cold and windswept suddenly and Barker was alone. An old man with binoculars and him — and that was it. He remembered the feeling of walking, his feet on the path, his breath snatched by the wind, but he couldn’t remember a single thing that he had thought. Perhaps he had thought nothing.
A car flashed by, a rush of air.
A girl beside him, murmuring.
‘Is that where we’re going?’ she asked.
The two-pronged tower that stood at the north end of the bridge rose out of the surrounding darkness like the horns of some huge animal, the red lights glinting, jewels embedded in the bone.
Barker nodded. ‘Yes.’
He realised that if they approached the bridge by the main road they would have to pass a manned toll-booth. Thinking it might be wiser to remain unseen, he led Glade down a curving cycle-path on to a smaller, two-lane road. They walked beneath a flyover, their footsteps echoing off the walls.
Before too long they reached a notice that said HUMBER BRIDGE COUNTRY PARK. Barker stood still, looked around. Two or three lorries, but no sign of any drivers. The wind had risen. The trees that had been planted to divide one section of the car-park from another were being thrown about in the wild air above his head, their leaves tinted yellow by the strange, dim streetlights.
They both saw the phone-box at the same time. Glade turned to him, her lips parted, her fingers lifting towards her chin. What harm could it do, he thought, now they were almost there?
‘OK,’ he said.
Inside the phone-box he gave her a handful of loose change. She dialled the number, then stared into the darkness, biting her lip. He was standing so close to her that he could smell her hair.
When the hospital answered she asked for Ward 15. Barker only heard one half of the conversation that followed: ‘How is he?’ and ‘Really? On Thursday?’ and ‘Give him my love.’ It seemed that her father was asleep, and couldn’t speak to her. While Barker waited for her to finish, he read the small framed notice above the phone. Instructions, warnings. Codes. You could call The Falklands from this lonely car-park. You could call Zaire.
‘So how is he?’ Barker asked when she had replaced the receiver.
‘He’s comfortable.’ She frowned. ‘They always say that.’
‘Anybody else you want to ring?’
She shook her head.
Outside again, they began to walk. In the absence of any cars, the fat white arrows painted on the ground looked pompous, absurd, but also faintly sinister. Behind his back, trees swirled and rustled in the wind.
‘You could have called your boyfriend,’ he said after a while.
‘I haven’t got one,’ she said, ‘not any more.’
‘Is that why you don’t wear any rings?’
‘That’s not why. And anyway, he didn’t give me any rings. He didn’t give me any jewellery at all.’ She spoke with a kind of wonder, as if she had only just realised.
‘What did he give you?’ Barker asked.
‘Tickets.’
‘Tickets?’
‘Plane tickets.’
Barker nodded, remembering. ‘To New Orleans.’
‘Once.’ Her face floated towards him through the grimy yellow light, floated somewhere below his shoulder, and she took hold of his elbow. ‘How did you know?’
It was something he couldn’t possibly have known, of course, but looking into her face, he saw that she wasn’t disconcerted, not in the slightest. Not suspicious either. Only curious. She was waiting for his answer, whatever it might be. He had the feeling that she would accept almost anything he said. Because of who he was.
‘Someone must have told me,’ he said.
She smiled, as if this was exactly the kind of answer she had expected, then she nodded and walked on.