After the Last Dance (37 page)

Fat Alan's house didn't have flowerbeds. Just two cars and a white van parked on the drive and that wasn't good news. Sometimes Fat Alan would force her down onto her knees as soon as he shut the door behind her. Ram himself down her throat so hard that she'd choke and her nose would be pressed against the stinking raw folds of his pendulous gut, but when Fat Alan had other men there… it was the worst of all the worse times. She'd blank out, pretend she was under the bed, until it was over, until they were done with her and she could leave with a wrap of something worth no more than twenty quid.

‘Who the fuck is it?' Fat Alan shouted when she knocked on the door.

‘Sally sent me,' she said and she heard him laugh before she saw the big unformed mass of him through the frosted panel.

He opened the door. She walked in. Kept her head down, stared at his trainers, felt his pudgy hand clutching the back of her neck and she let him push her down, saw his other hand delving into his tracksuit bottoms and then there was a sharp knock on the door. Two sharp knocks. Pause. Two sharp knocks. Pause.

‘Fuck's sake,' Fat Alan had shouted at the unseen caller. ‘Give me a minute.'

He frogmarched her down the hall. For one heart-stopping moment, they passed the lounge where the sound of music, heavy beats, thudded through the door, but he kept going until they came to the kitchen.

‘Don't fucking move,' he said and shut the door.

The dog was in there. It was a huge Alsatian called Killer. Fat Alan treated the dog like he treated everything else, but the dog didn't take it quietly. It snarled and snapped, growled and barked. Once it had bitten her when Fat Alan had made her put her hand in its mouth.

Now the dog sat there, ears alert, staring at her. She looked everywhere but at the dog. At the empty bottles, cans and takeaway containers. Then she looked at the table. There were bags and bags of pills and powders because Fat Alan knew that she was the only person he could leave in there with strict instructions not to fucking move and she wouldn't fucking move.

Then she saw the money. A huge roll of notes secured with a rubber band. That much money didn't even look real, not when she'd hardly seen a twenty-pound note before, not hundreds upon hundreds of them, and perhaps that was why she picked it up; just to see if it was real.

She hadn't imagined that money would actually weigh something. That there'd be so much of it that she could hardly close her hand around it.

The dog just sat there and watched her, like he couldn't quite believe it either.

She didn't know how long she stood there, holding the money. Not even thinking about what it could buy because that was too much to process. Then Fat Alan was in the doorway.

‘What the fuck are you doing?' He didn't shout. Didn't need to. ‘Taking my fucking money, like a thieving bitch? Give me one good reason why I shouldn't slit you from ear to ear?'

There were no good reasons. Not one. He walked over. She watched him get closer. She wasn't scared. Not really. More resigned, accepting that this was what was coming to her. Then she saw the knife. It was just an ordinary knife. In an ordinary home, ordinary people would use it to chop up vegetables. She picked it up and he laughed, like it was funny. He said something to her, she didn't hear what, because she shoved the knife at him, into him. It wasn't easy. It didn't just slide in like all his blubber was butter. She had to drive the knife in. Really smash it into him.

Then she took her hand away. The knife stayed where it was. Inches deep.

‘What the fuck did you do that for?' He didn't sound angry, but curious.

‘I don't know,' she said.

‘Do you know what I'm going to do to you?'

‘No.'

‘I'm gonna take the knife and I'm gonna shove it in your cunt and up your arse and then I'm going to make some more holes in you and then I'm going to get my friends to fuck each one. We'll fuck you to death,' he'd said, like that was a nice way to spend the afternoon. ‘That's what I'm going to fucking do.'

She'd pulled the knife out then. There wasn't any blood until she did that and then there was, so much of it, and he gave one surprised bellow and that was when the fear grabbed hold of her so she slammed the knife in and it was much easier this time to stab it through all that fat, all those rotten layers. Push. Pull. Push. Pull. Push. And he must have fought back, but she couldn't remember that, though later she discovered that she was covered in bruises and, to this day, she still didn't have any sensation in the little finger and ring finger on her left hand. But back then, he slipped on the blood and landed with a dull thud and a roar and she heard a someone coming down the hall and she left the knife stuck in him and the back door was unlocked and she launched herself through it.

She ran. Could hear barking and the dog, Killer, was coming after her. No, not after her but running with her because he hated Fat Alan as much as she did and at last he was free too.

She kept on running, running, running beyond the confines of the estate, running until she hit the main road and pulled off her tracksuit top because it was covered in blood and threw it over a hedge then she ran until she got to the big supermarket and she slowed down and despite what she'd done, she was back to nothing and she could slip unseen onto a bus that was headed to the station amid a crowd of old ladies with shopping trollies and smokers' coughs.

Then she hid and waited until the train pulled into the platform. She got on the train. Found a seat and hunched herself up as small as she could and she stayed like that until the ticket collector came round and asked for her ticket and she pretended to ignore him. But he wouldn't go away and then she saw that she was still holding all that money and that she could use some of it to buy a ticket but she didn't need to, because someone said, ‘It's all right. I'll pay for her ticket,' and that was when she met Charles.

 

She was crying again, the tears slipping out along with her confession. The burden she'd carried on her back all these years… it had weighed her down. Crippled her. Made her hard. But even now, she didn't feel sorry. She wasn't ashamed of what she'd done. If she hadn't killed Fat Alan, then she wouldn't have been able to kill the shadow that she'd been. But the thing about shadows was that they had a way of reappearing whenever it got dark.

‘That's it,' Jane said. ‘That's who I am. You know what I'm really like now.'

She waited for Leo to look at her as if he couldn't bear to look at her. Waited for him to turn away from her. To hate her. To pull her out from under the bed.

But he was still lying on the floor, eyes fixed on her face. Then he stretched out his arm and she flinched away from him. ‘Jane, please,' he said. Those two words gave nothing away. ‘I've lost loads of weight but I'm still too big to be able to get under the bed with you.'

‘You're never as funny as you think you are,' she told him, though somehow he'd managed to crack a smile from her frozen face. ‘You can't hide behind a joke for ever.'

‘Yeah, I'm starting to get that,' Leo said and he stretched out his arm again and this time she let him take hold of her hand. ‘It's all right. Everything's going to be all right. You have to trust me on that.'

Leo didn't say anything else. He held her hand and stroked her knuckles over and over again, while she cried. Even once she'd managed to stop crying, he didn't let go and Jane hoped that maybe they could stay like that for ever.

 

In the end, they both chose not to be fucked up.

Though Leo never realised how hard it would be to love someone who didn't believe in love.

Still, he's fiercely glad of his love, though he never expected it to feel so sentimental, like a cheesy love song playing on the radio and leaking out of an open window on a sunny day.

His love for Jane – and he winces even as he forms the thought – makes him want to be a better man. He can't imagine that he'll ever do drugs again. Not now that he knows what he knows. He's only faltered once and that was one almighty alcohol-fuelled bender the night that Jane confessed her crimes. Her other crimes. The man that she'd jilted, not the other way round. The long con she'd been planning. Waiting it out so she could get a decent alimony payment from Rose's estate.

Leo had gone and got so drunk, he could hardly see straight. He'd come back, vomited on Rose's roses and ended up comatose on the kitchen floor.

Jane had been furious. ‘If you promise that you'll never get like this again, then I promise that I'll never keep another secret from you. You have to promise, Leo. I can't be strong enough for both of us. I can't do that any more.'

Leo had promised because a world without Jane in it would be cold and lonely and a quick slide back into dirty old habits. But Jane tilts his world by one hundred and eighty degrees and she's usually right about everything, apart from the times when she's spectacularly wrong.

Just as he builds houses, he's building a life for the two of them. He wants to give Jane the things she's never had, the kind of things that don't cost money.

Now that it's summer at Lullington Bay, on the weekends he fills the house with people. George, of course, and Lydia and Frank who are renovating a guesthouse down the coast in Brighton; Mark and his family; Fergus and his wife and their three redheaded, freckle-faced little girls. Leo even invited his parents down, although that was two days of awkward silences, barbed remarks, passive-aggressive comments and one enormous row over Sunday lunch between him and his mother, while Jane and his father made their excuses and walked to the village pub, even though it was pissing down with rain, where they bonded over a mutual love of Ealing comedies and sticky toffee pudding.

Now he Skypes his mother every Sunday afternoon and she knits coats for the two Staffie-cross puppies he and Jane found in a layby the time they went to see a man in Hayward's Heath about some reclaimed timber.

‘But they have to stay downstairs, Leo,' Jane had said the first night but she was always the one who got up to comfort them when they began to whimper and howl. Now they sleep in a basket next to their bed.

It's almost a family. It's ties that bind them together.

Leo's still a gambling man, a risk taker. Jane might not know what love is but if he loves her hard enough and well enough, eventually even Jane has to give in. He's counting on it.

He's put everything he has on red and he's waiting for the wheel to stop spinning.

 

It's easy, the easiest thing in the world, to love Leo.

He's actually very loveable. Not in some sweet, saccharine way that involves date nights and flowers bought from petrol stations on a Friday evening. Or necklaces and cuddly toys that spell out ‘I love you'. That's not their way.

But love isn't something Jane takes lightly. There'd been a time when she'd found it ridiculously easy to say ‘I love you' because it wasn't true, but when you thought it might be the greatest truth you'd ever told, it was very, very hard. Besides, once you'd told someone that you loved them and really, really meant it, you'd shown your entire hand and Jane has always played her cards close to her chest.

For a long time after Rose's death, it felt like Jane was holding her breath and she only let it out when Rose's will could no longer be contested. When she told her lawyer, Mr Whipple, that she didn't want a divorce. When Leo sat down with Charles, Rose's executor, and said he wanted his inheritance placed in a trust, that he could manage on the salary he draws as what Rose stipulated in her will as an Executive Without a Briefcase. ‘You give me access to all that money and I might go off the rails,' Leo had said. ‘I really don't want to go off the rails.'

With Leo's salary and the interest Jane earns on the investments that Charles makes for her, they're comfortable. They have a comfortable life. Sometimes what you think you want doesn't come close to what you really need.

Jane needs Leo now he's the best version of himself. He uses his time wisely: working with Mark on converting an old art deco council block in Stoke Newington into homes for essential workers. Spends one day a week shadowing an architect and is forever taking meetings with people from the Tate Modern about an exhibition he's curating of British Pop Art, mostly culled from Rose's art collection.

During the week they live in the little mews house in Kensington. Jane helps George pack up Rose's house and takes classes, studies anatomy and makes notes as she trains to become a yoga instructor, then on Friday afternoon, they head down to Sussex.

Lullington Bay is invariably full of people but Jane prefers it when it's just her and Leo and their two silly dogs. They have a kitchen disco on Friday nights and Leo gets up early to go down to the beach and paint the sea. Jane like the pictures he paints on overcast days the best.

Mostly Jane lives for those long nights in Lullington Bay when she lies in bed in Leo's arms, her hand over his heart. In those moments, she finally knows what safe feels like. Underneath the steady cadence of his breathing, she can hear the faint lap of the sea against the shore and it echoes in her head like the words she still hasn't found the courage to say.

I love you, I love you,
I
love you.
 

Rose is back on the dancefloor of Rainbow Corner, with the smell of brilliantine and sweat-soaked rayon catching at the back of her throat. The band plays on, ever on and on, light from the chandeliers glinting off the brass section as Rose is dipped and twirled and spun round.

Everyone she loves is here. Reunited with her girls, her precious, precious girls. Sylvia, as beautiful and brilliant as ever, brushes past in the arms of a strapping GI. Phyllis waves each time Rose glides by, shouts something out that's lost in the beat of the music and Maggie's sitting with a drink in her hand and her smile is no longer a dark, secret thing.

Sometimes she thinks she sees Danny. Men she danced with. Girls who gave her hankies, spare change, a shoulder to cry on. Gosh, even Shirley is here, absolutely splendid in her pale blue taffeta. But Rose only has eyes for Edward, who's holding her in his arms and he hasn't once stepped on her feet.

She's going to stay here for ever. Because Rainbow Corner never closes. They never turn anyone away.

When they opened the doors of Rainbow Corner, they threw away the key.