Mostly he was tired. Hunger and disappointment were, in their own way, as painful as pancreatitis and he would have willingly swapped the former for the latter. And while his mother thought she could save his life, there were days when he wondered whether it was worth saving.
Then Leah came.
It was meant to be a temporary arrangement. She would live with her father until she got back on her feet and had sufficient money in the bank to feel safe. Gavin had pushed her out of the front door with nothing, not even her wallet. In Barclays she discovered that the joint account was overdrawn. Too ashamed to put in a reverse-charge call home she spent the first night walking around the centre of Manchester, sitting at bus stops when she grew too tired to stand, kept awake by the fear that she would be preyed upon in some way. She rang her father the following morning but he took too long to arrange the money transfer. It was a further twenty-four hours before she could pick up her train fare from the building society, so she spent the second night in the women’s hostel to which the police had directed her. It was not an experience she wanted to repeat.
Leaving the estate had been the first part of the grand plan. But you never did leave the estate, not really. You carried a little bit of it inside you wherever you went, something grubby and broken and windswept. You never trusted anyone who was kind. You married a man who made you feel ugly and weak and scared just like your mother once did, because deep down there was a comfort in being hurt in the old, familiar ways. So in the end the two miscarriages seemed almost a blessing, because they would have been Gavin’s children, just like it had been Gavin’s house and Gavin’s car and Gavin’s money. He would have let her do all the hard work then rolled up one day, lifted them out of the playpen and taken them away like he’d done with everything else.
So here she was, working as a dental receptionist and returning each evening to the front room where she’d spent her childhood, sitting on the dove-grey leatherette sofa which stuck to the back of her legs in hot weather, filling the dishwasher in precisely the way her father said it had to be filled, having tea at six forty-five every day and never, ever moving the speakers off the masking tape rectangles on the carpet despite the fact that her father only played R&B and soul from the sixties and seventies which was music about dancing and sex and not giving a fuck about whether the mugs were on the top or the bottom rack of the dishwasher, because her father was coping with retirement and loneliness and ageing in the same way he had coped with her mother, in the same way he had coped with being a parent, by looking the other way and concentrating very hard on something of no importance whatsoever.
She met Bunny while scouring the neighbourhood for a strimmer. Her father’s was broken and chores which took her out of the house were becoming increasingly attractive. She rang the doorbell twice because she could hear the television and after forty strimmerless houses it was becoming a challenge. She’d given up and was walking back down the path when the door opened behind her. “Leah Curtis.” She was too shocked by the size and shape of him to hear what he was saying. The liquid waddle, the waist which touched both sides of the doorway. “You were at St. Jude’s. You won’t remember me.”
He was right. She had no memory whatsoever. “You haven’t got a strimmer, have you?”
“Come in.” He rotated then rocked from side to side as he made his way back towards the front room.
There was a yeasty, unwashed smell in the hallway so she left the front door open.
He bent his knees and rolled backwards onto a large, mustard-yellow sofa bed. Storage Hunters was on the TV. The wallpaper must have gone up circa 1975, psychedelic bamboo shoots in red and orange, peeling a little at the edges. On the table beside the sofa was a tiny model battlefield — soldiers, sand dunes, an armoured car — and beside the battlefield, a neatly organised collection of paint tubs, aerosols, brushes, folded rags and scalpels, the tips of their blades pushed into corks.
“I get out of breath,” he said. “Have a look in the utility room. Kitchen. Turn right. Bunny Wallis. I was in the year above.”
There was a garden chair, a bin liner of unwanted clothing and a broken bedside lamp. Maybe she did remember. “Chubby Checker” they called him. She hadn’t talked to him once in five years. She wondered if this was all their fault in some obscure way. She grabbed the orange cord snaking out from under the ironing board and pulled. She said she’d bring it back as soon as she’d finished.
“Whenever you want. I’m not leaving the country.”
She bought him four bottles of Black Sheep Ale as a thank-you. Only when she was standing on the doorstep did she realise that it might not be medically appropriate but he just smiled and said, “Don’t tell my mother.”
“Does she live here?”
“It sometimes feels like that. Do you want a cup of tea?”
She said yes and was sent to make it. He remembered enough about her to be flattering — that she and Abby had run away to Sheffield, that she had a signed photograph of Shane McGowan — but not so much as to seem creepy. The milk was slightly off but he was good company. He gave her a Panzer captain from the Afrika Korps together with a magnifying glass so that she could see the details in the face.
She was going to say how much her father would like it, the neatness, the precision, but she didn’t want to think of the two men as having anything in common, because in half an hour Bunny had asked more questions than her father had asked in two months.
He said his mother had put him on a penitential diet about which he could do nothing, so she came back a few days later with a box of chocolates. His doctor would probably not be happy but it would make a change from the broccoli and the Brussels sprouts.
When she was five years old Leah’s mother had taken her to the gravel pit to watch her drown Beauty’s new kittens. It was a long walk and Leah cried the whole way, hearing them mewl and struggle inside the duffel bag. Her mother said it would toughen her up. She laughed as she held the bag underwater, not out loud but quietly to herself as if she were remembering a funny story. She wanted Leah to know what she was capable of. It was so much more efficient than hitting her. After that she could make Leah feel sick inside just by narrowing her eyes.
When they had guests her mother called her “darling.” So how could Leah tell anyone? It was fathers who abused their children. Cruel mothers were the stuff of fairy tales.
Bunny didn’t find her attractive at first. She was oddly shapeless, a skinny girl carrying too much weight. Her hair was flat and there was something sour about the expression into which her face fell when she didn’t think she was being watched. But she woke something which had been going slowly to sleep inside him over the past couple of years. He pictured her naked, moving through the house, perched on the armchair, wiping herself on the toilet, standing at the sink. He could no longer get an erection let alone masturbate so there was no relief from these images and every fantasy left a small bruise on his heart. She was kind and bought him sweet, sticky things. They never talked about his weight and she understood the tyranny of mothers. Five minutes into their second meeting he realised how badly he needed her to keep coming.