‘Going down?’ he asked.
The question embarrassed her and she felt herself blush. He smirked. He also knew her secret. She stepped out even though it was the wrong floor, and walked halfway down the corridor. When she considered it safe, she returned to the landing. Now what? Immediately, she was faced with the same indecision she’d had on the ground floor. There was a large window looking out over the top of the town and she escaped to it. She remembered what she’d done yesterday, pressing herself against the glass in that smutty way. She remembered Tim standing up before going to bed, and the look on his face. She wasn’t sure what she felt about that look. She knew he was a good man really, and that he loved her. She questioned whether she loved him back. She’d always taken that for granted, but here she was. She turned away from the window and found the door to the stairwell. A giant number four was painted on the white wall. She could hardly be expected to walk down four flights of stairs in these heels. She turned right instead and began ascending.
His room was 513. She hadn’t thought she’d been paying attention when he’d told her, but somehow it had stuck. She walked up to his door and stopped. If someone came out of their room at this precise moment she would have to knock. In the meantime, she just stood there. She looked at her watch. It was 2.15pm. She had just over an hour before she had to collect Ruby.
‘Oh, you’re all dressed up,’ the host at Ruby’s party had said to her. She’d also known her secret.
One hour. How much damage could you really do in sixty minutes? She leant forward and softly laid her cheek against the door. You went so far, playing these silly games, and then you went no further or too far. This door, it was exactly that. She pictured herself on the other side of it, her dress crumpled on the carpet, her appropriate underwear discarded nearby. She saw herself on the bed with her legs up in the air, or bent over it, or maybe on all fours. She couldn’t comprehend these images. They were so preposterous, outlandish. She lifted her arm and slid her knuckles softly, soundlessly, over the wood. Now take your hand back, then tap it forward again. That’s all it is. Her hand fell to her side.
‘Are you okay, ma’am?’
She spun around quickly. A cleaner was in the corridor. She was dragging a hoover and there was a trolley nearby.
‘Is that your room?’ she asked.
Beth tapped her throat apologetically. She didn’t know what that gesture was meant to imply, and nor did the cleaner, who looked even more confused. ‘It’s just that I want to clean in there, if not,’ she said. She yanked on the rubber tube and the hoover sidled up close to her.
Beth realised that she wasn’t going inside, and that she was relieved. She pointed down the corridor. ‘Just leaving,’ she whispered hoarsely – she didn’t want to be heard – before smiling again and walking back to the lifts. She didn’t even like Kyle. Not even a little bit.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
At 3.02pm Ben snatched up his car keys. The sudden rattle disturbing the quiet room. The letter screwed up in a ball beneath his desk. The door closing on it. At the foot of the stairs he avoided meeting his mother’s eyes.
‘Just off to Maddy’s,’ he said in a casual voice that sounded fake even to him.
He felt her eyes on him as he walked down the drive. It made him walk awkwardly, like you do on stage. He didn’t want to be seen. The white Astra had 90,000 miles on the clock. It had a slow puncture in the front left tyre. On the window a thin strip of tape remained from an old parking ticket. He got in. The passenger seat was empty beside him and it probably would be from now on. He was incredibly hot. His skin prickled beneath his shirt and a bead of sweat tickled his temple. He glanced in the rear-view mirror, from which the small plastic trainer dangled by a lace. He turned the ignition and reversed out onto the quiet road. His mother’s figure was still motionless in the doorway. He refused to acknowledge her. He put it into first and lifted his foot off the clutch, jolting the car forward. The small plastic trainer danced and kicked in his peripheral vision. He’d had the conversation before, the conversation he was now heading towards. It had repeated in his mind hundreds of times since the letter had arrived. Sometimes it ended less badly than other times, but it never ended well. The thing to remember was to keep going. Sometimes when he ran he wanted to stop. The finish line doesn’t come to meet you, he’d say to himself over and over.
It was only a short distance to the park, less than two miles. He passed the supermarket and drove through the amber lights. He passed the jumble of street signs that no one noticed and the tennis courts that were always deserted at this time of year. Further on, the tall houses without front lawns leaned over the pavement to funnel him forwards, the car’s white reflection sliding over their triple-glazed windows. Up ahead, the green of the trees rose above the rooftops. He could drive past. He could turn around. He could simply stop. The thing to remember was to keep going. The finish line doesn’t come to meet you. It was 3.11pm.
She crested the small rise and saw him sitting alone on the bench about a hundred metres away. She had read his message earlier that day – Can we talk? – like she’d read it a hundred times before. A single strand of hope had still dangled, but when she saw him sitting there it snapped like all the others and by the time she reached him the places inside her that had begun to soften with him had crusted over again. He looked up when she arrived and the expression in his eyes had no impact on her. She sat down on the bench next to him and waited. He didn’t speak for a long time.
Eventually he said, ‘I’ve practised this so many times but it’s not the same in person.’ She was listening, but from a long, long way away. She lit a cigarette and continued waiting.
‘I told my parents I wasn’t going,’ he went on. He looked at her for a reaction but there was none. He said many things after that but none of them out loud and after a long while he put his hand on her knee. She left it there but it had no impact on her. Silence poured into the gap between them and forced them further apart. He withdrew his hand. ‘But I’ve got to go,’ he said. For the first time she looked at him. Her eyes were cloudy with make-up and difficult to see clearly. ‘To America, I mean,’ he added clumsily.
She looked away again and shrugged. ‘Okay, Hamlet. What a shock.’ She continued smoking, staring out over the wide green field. A line of trees split it down the middle. They were still in the calm, cool air. Beneath their thick plumage their branches would harbour nests and new life would emerge in the coming weeks. Broken shells would lie on the ground and downy feathers would turn over and scatter when the breeze got up. ‘Was that all, then?’ she asked, standing up.
His head dropped and his spine seemed to sink between his shoulder blades. He was hot again. On the ground beneath his feet pine needles had dried brown. ‘I don’t want to go,’ he said. ‘I’ve always wanted to and now I don’t want to anymore.’
‘Yes, you do. You’ll be fine.’
He glanced up. The low sun behind her created a shimmering, golden aura. He knew what was beneath her clothes. He wanted to kiss her. ‘And you?’ he asked.
She laughed shortly and looked at him with amusement. ‘What do you care?’ She saw the shock and hurt come to his face, but it had no impact on her. She dropped her cigarette and watched the red tip go grey.
‘You know I do.’
‘Words,’ she said, lifting her hand almost imperceptibly as if to brush his remark away. She reached into her pocket for another cigarette, but the pack was empty. She squashed it in her fist. Her hand closed and reclosed on it until it was as small and tight a bundle as she could make it. A toddler with its mother passed them on the way to the playground. She watched him until something in her gaze made it cry.
‘It’s not just words,’ he said, but she ignored him. She looked bored. In a moment she’d be gone and this tepid, phony ending would be over. He felt short-changed. But he could think of nothing that would keep her there. The finish line doesn’t come to meet you. He stood up. ‘I leave in two weeks. I’ll be back again in the summer. If you wanted we could…’
She shook her head.
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Silly idea.’ She took out her phone and he saw her delete his name from her list of contacts. She began then to scroll through her gallery and he looked away, into the park. The graffiti was still legible. From where he sat he could only see a few letters, but he knew what it said. He found himself pointing to it. ‘That’s you, isn’t it, Madeline?’
She looked up and followed his finger, had already known what he was pointing at. Playgrounds always appeared different after dark. She remembered her knees on the soft rubber that was meant to stop people getting hurt. She heard again the other boys’ laughter echoing beneath the metal roof. Some were waiting their turn. Some were carrying on without her. She remembered taking the small transparent bag that was wet and sticky on the outside. She looked back at Ben. His face was ashen and ashamed but it had no impact on her. She watched it become a carousel of other faces, sneering faces, sweating faces, faces with blue eyes and brown eyes and green eyes and closed eyes and wide eyes that were glazed over, faces with thin lips and yellow teeth and broken noses, young faces covered in pimples, old faces hidden by white beards and dark glasses, fat faces, ugly faces, handsome faces, faces from magazines, from schoolyards, from dark corners and public toilets. Each one blurred into the next until they all became the face of her dead foster father, and then even his face vanished into a black and nameless silhouette in the glare of the bare lightbulb behind his head.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ben was saying to her now, repeating the phrase like he meant it. He’d told her once that he’d not lie to her. She looked at him, his earnest, guilty face. He affected concern and tenderness, but he was the same as the rest; rosy-cheeked, clean cut, kind-hearted, but he was just the same as the rest.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s me. That’s exactly who I am.’
In years to come she would regret that. There would be another man there by then, and another one after that and after that. They would all be the same man. Sagging and stale on the couch beside her. A baby would crawl past on the thin carpet in front of the television. Another would be growing inside her. She would ignore those vague, incoherent utterances left over from last night’s drinking and that morning’s fighting and continue painting her nails. She’d wonder if things could have turned out differently. She’d see him walking to his car, his fine, smooth stride, and think of all the moments she still had then to call him back. She’d remember how he stopped and looked at her, and how she turned her back on him and walked away. She’d wish she’d been kinder.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
By late afternoon the sun had baked off the early chill and filled the day with yellows and vivid greens. Puffs of cloud hung unmoving in the sky and dark shadows lulled beneath the trees. It was the first, unmistakable sign of spring.
Beth, bent forward at the hips, arms fixed straight in front of her, marched through the streets with Ruby regal in her pushchair. She might have paused to tell her daughter that three years and seven months was far too old to still require such a thing. But making her walk meant impatience, aggravation, avoiding the cracks in the pavement and picking up dropped things.
It was nearly 4pm when they began to make their way down the steady slope that led out of the centre of town and towards their home. It wasn’t much more than a fifteen-minute walk. The shopping had been placed in the netted hold beneath the pushchair. Ruby was wriggling in her seat. A hard edge of something was jutting up painfully into her lower back. The bags leaned to one side creating an imbalance that pulled at the handles. Beth thought the milk had probably toppled over.
‘Mummy, it’s still there.’ Ruby arched and twisted around to look up at her mother. She was put out. She was tired from the party and her voice was half whine, half reproach. She had already complained twice about the object poking her. Beth considered stopping. Had she done so everything would have been thirty seconds out of sync. But it wasn’t far.
‘We’re nearly home,’ she said.
To a bird flying overhead, the scene below was banal, innocuous, nothing out of the ordinary. There was no commotion, no drama, no sense of excitement or foreboding. It was just a quiet town, like any of the dozen or so towns it would fly over that day, with the to’ers and fro’ers toing and froing, the same as they ever did on a middling to fine day in early spring. Tomorrow, to that same bird or another one, it would be the same again. There would be no signs of what was about to occur. It would have been cleared up and other people would walk the pavements, other cars would glint at the lights. In a month, April showers would wash away all traces and then the summer would come and more people and more cars, and then winter and maybe snow, and by this time next year, at this time and on this day, that bird overhead would turn its twitching eyes down and everything would be exactly as it was, as it would always be. It’s a strange, consoling thing, the ceaseless forward movement of the world. It means everything passes and nothing matters. We are, each of us, just pebbles tossed in the torrent. It was 4:01pm.
Barely a mile away Ben heard the heavy playground gate bang against its metal frame. Somewhere far off a dog barked in response. When he realised Madeline wasn’t going to turn around he opened the car door and got in. For a minute or more he sat motionless behind the wheel, the keys in his hands and his hands in his lap. He watched her until she disappeared and then he watched the place where he’d last seen her, a small black shape that could have been anything, before eventually starting the engine.
