All That Mullarkey (30 page)

… eight, nine, ten. She settled Shona into her high chair and began more sandwiches for herself. ‘I’ll get the morning-after pill.’ Counting slices of ham, she decided she had plenty. ‘Hungry? I can make you …’

The ham packet shot out of her hand and across the worktop and she almost suffered whiplash as Justin swung her around to face him.

‘Those pills don’t always work. Stop dodging the issue – if you’re pregnant this time, we get married. Right?’

She pulled free, pointedly smoothing back her hair. What an idea! Life would never be the same. ‘All that shotgun stuff went out decades ago.’

For a brief moment she was scorched by his glare. Then he turned away and began to make tea, silently dropping tea bags into cups, slopping in the milk. He refilled Shona’s drink and sat down at the kitchen table. It was almost as if they were back in those weeks when he’d lived there, when they’d readied meals together and eaten them together with Shona yelling and singing from her chair.

He remained silent while Cleo and Shona ate, while Cleo cleaned up Shona’s sticky fingers, unclipped her plastic bib and set her free. But she was aware of his gaze and that he hadn’t finished yet.

He waited until she settled down to her cooling drink, Shona playing with a wooden spoon and a brown paper bag on the floor. ‘Are your parents together?’

Cleo sipped, nodded. She couldn’t imagine them, rigid and conformist as they were, doing anything but staying completely married.

‘Mine, too.’ He’d finished his tea. His eyes were steady now, and calm. ‘And that’s what I want for my kids. A traditional family, mother and father living together, married if possible.’

‘Not everyone does that any more.’ But what a wonderful antidote to her loneliness. She flicked her hair out of her eyes. ‘And, anyway, your argument’s illogical. Why get married if I’m pregnant? We have a child, we aren’t married.’

‘You’re right.’ He nodded slowly. ‘You’d better marry me anyway.’

She stood suddenly, clattering the plates together and whisking them into the sink. ‘Such a romantic, old-fashioned proposal! But no thanks. You don’t marry for expediency in this day and age, Justin, you marry for love and togetherness. When nobody else will do.’ Steam rose as she ran water into the sink, making her eyes smart.

His voice was just behind her. ‘Aren’t you tempted? Someone to come home to, to share worries with, a proper sex life …’

She swung on him suddenly, voice brutal with anger, eyes boiling. ‘Don’t make me sound like a lonely, desperate old slapper! I’m not needy and I’m not pitiful. I’m fine alone.’

Stoically, he stood his ground. ‘I said that very badly.’

She forced out a laugh, raucous and artificial. ‘Have you ever thought how many people used to be trapped in loveless, pointless marriages, because they married to legitimise children?’

He relapsed into silence.

Later, when he was leaving, she muttered, ‘And anyway, what about when one of us meets the Nobody-Else-Will-Do person? The expedient marriage would dissolve faster than Oxo.’

He stared into the garden, at the enormous feathers of pampas grass nodding and lifting in afternoon light that brightened and faded as thin clouds raced across the sun. ‘Possibly. In a marriage of only expediency. Probably. Yes.’

She wasn’t pregnant. Her period arrived even before she could see a doctor on Monday morning and she told Justin when he came to visit Shona. ‘You’re off the hook, scare over,’ she breezed. ‘I’ll be at The Three Fishes if you want me, I’m meeting Dora.’ Then to Shona, ‘Be a good girl for Justin,’ kiss, kiss, ‘I’ll be home soon.’ Back to Justin, ‘So that’s great, isn’t it?’

He accepted the pink and blue sock Shona had just pulled off to deposit in his hand. ‘Lovely.’

Chapter Thirty-Six

Muggie’s was jumping, as it did every Friday night. Not that Justin was particularly in a nightclub frame of mind. He was annoyed to catch himself scanning the crowd in case Cleo was there with her dippy sister; but there was no sign of her glossy dark hair in the crush. She was probably sitting at home alone while Shona slept upstairs. He tried to push the image away.

He felt as if he was going through the motions: drinking,
talent spotting with Martin and Drew. As he didn’t feel drawn
to any of the talent, he was glad of the distraction when Gez and Jaz turned up. ‘Hey! Nice to see you. Gez, you’ve become a bit of a pipe-and-slippers man since Jaz moved in.’

Jaz laughed. ‘Don’t wind him up, you know he’ll only try and keep up with the big boys.’ She was drinking a pint, golden in the lights. It made Justin think of Cleo.

‘He’ll be fine.’

‘Two hours,’ predicted Jaz, pragmatically. And, sure enough, Gez insisted on matching Martin and Drew drink for drink and swamped his personal alcohol limit just about in line with her prediction. Jaz dragged him into a taxi and set off home, which left Justin adrift; Martin and Drew had already homed in on the women they’d selected as their targets for the night, not betraying how much they’d drunk by so much as a wobble. Justin, head spinning, envied them their capacity and decided to go and take a leak and then make for the taxi rank and home.

But his dad had always warned him that it was dangerous to be drunk and on your own.

One moment Justin was weaving out of the Gents, pleasantly hazy. The next, he felt as if a charging buffalo had slammed him against the wall and was stamping on his ribs and stomach with well-placed hooves, each blow crashing into him with such force that he could utter no more than ‘Whoof!’ as he bounced off the wall.

Doubled over and crowing for breath, he was vaguely aware that the buffalo had vanished. Then some other bloke, large and loud, dragged him to his feet, whisked him round and slammed his arms behind his back. ‘Steady on, mate. Had one too many, have we?’

Another, equally large, crowded against him. ‘Calm down, calm down. There’s no need for that – animal!’

Before he could crow sufficient air into his lungs to demand to know what the hell they were talking about, the bouncers arrived, resplendent in dinner jackets. They hustled him into a back room, along with the two gorillas who had ‘restrained’ him.

‘Just hang about to tell the police what happened,’ said the biggest bouncer to the two gorillas. ‘And you, mate, you were the one involved, were you?’ He was addressing a wiry man with a geometric goatee and a brown jacket. This, by elimination, should be the buffalo.

Justin blinked. No, that couldn’t be right. Him? He was just some ordinary geezer, not tall, not broad, not muscly. Surely he hadn’t inflicted the stabbing pain in Justin’s ribcage and made his stomach feel as if it might heave out its contents at any minute?

Dizzily, he shook his head as he was hustled into a dusty little office and his arms released. He tried to frame truculent challenges. ‘What’s going on? Are you on something, mate?’ But his lips felt like rubber, refusing to form the words, and his brain kept telling his body that he was falling violently sideways, making him stagger.

The police response time was impressive. They were two well-built, close-cropped men who seemed as if Friday night aggro was all too familiar to them. The instant they rolled in, the buffalo sprang up, clamouring, ‘Look at my arm! This bloody animal just went for me, he had a little knife. Like a razor it is.’ He was clutching his forearm and blood was oozing through the brown jacket and between his fingers.

Justin wished he could sober up. Then he’d be able to sort out whatever was going on. But he was beginning to feel real alarm. He’d never carried a knife in his life. He tried to snort, ‘As if!’ It came out as ‘Zff!’

Then the gorillas began their support act. ‘We had to pull him off. He’s obviously rat-arsed.’

And, ‘It took two of us to calm him down. “Calm down, mate”, I said. But it still took two of us.’

Justin tried to organise his mouth to exclaim just as emphatically that he hadn’t even swung a blow. But with the buffalo maintaining, ‘He’s some piss-head, look what he’s done to my arm! Search him, he’s got a blade’, the officers had to search him. And, sure enough. Would you look at that? A small, red-handled craft knife had appeared in Justin’s side jacket pocket.

He was promptly nicked and escorted to a police car with his hands cuffed in front of him, just like in an episode of
The Bill
, and driven through the night-time streets under sodium-orange lights before turning into a gated yard behind the police station. From there he was taken to a holding area, the benches already populated by other arresting officers and Friday night naughty boys and girls.

‘I wasn’t doing anything!’ he protested. But it was a waste of breath insisting that he had only been indulging in the innocent pastime of getting pleasantly pissed with his mates at a nightclub. Most of the other clientele seemed fuelled by alcohol or worse; and it was obviously all in a night’s work for the arresting officers, whose navy-blue presence contrasted stolidly with the colourful, often raucous, sometimes nervous, occasionally nauseous miscreants.

‘Bit of a queue,’ Justin’s arresting officer observed, philosophically. ‘We’ll get you through as soon as possible, mate.’ As if he was in any particular hurry to explore the rest of the police station. Though he would have liked to be rid of the handcuffs with the bloody uncomfortable flat hinge between his wrists. The officer joined a discussion on the other side of him as to whether Man United’s dominance could last forever and kept trying to draw Justin in. Justin wished he and the constant crackle of police radios would just shut up.

By the time it was Justin’s turn before the custody sergeant, speech of a sort was returning. He was booked in as if in some kind of outlandish hotel, read his rights and offered a phone call. He had to empty his pockets and then they took his watch, ring and tie. As if he was going to hang himself. ‘I’m not suicidal,’ he protested angrily.

The custody sergeant was unmoved. ‘Just procedure, mate. You’ll get it all back.’

A custody assistant escorted him to a big cupboard where he was handed a bright blue vinyl mattress to cart under his arm through a grey metal door.

He was left alone to gaze at his claustrophobic cell of white tiled walls, a bed, a door with a sliding aperture, a steel toilet and a horrid tracing-paper loo roll balanced on the dwarf wall alongside it.

Sobriety was dawning, with panic chasing. This was all too scarily real. No one had charged in to rescue him or roared with laughter at the joke.

This was him. Justin Mullarkey. Sitting alone in a locked police cell on a Friday night, repelled by the pong of body odour, vomit and disinfectant, the constant racket of shouting against a background of unlikely piped music.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

‘Sorry mate, there’s no taxi expected at this address.’ Justin slammed down the handset of the entry phone system. He squinted at the clock: 06.30. No point trying to get back to sleep, although his eyes felt sandy with the lack of it.

During the night his phone had rung – according to his phone log – at 12.01, 12.56 and 1.30, at which point he’d admitted defeat and turned it off. The evening before, a pizza boy had been very hacked off when Justin had refused delivery of four double-topped extra large pizzas that he hadn’t ordered. After that had come a shipping order of Thai food and his entry phone had almost melted from the vocal fury of the thwarted delivery guy.

He trudged off to the shower, totally, absolutely and dreadfully pissed off at the lunatic ex-tenants who were, evidently, making good their threat to ‘get’ him. Yesterday, he’d seen the long face of the man glaring across the road and up at his windows.

He wasn’t scared of such a loser, he thought, standing under the water, as hot as he could stand it – but he was kind of worried about what the loser would do next.

It wasn’t hard to get to work on time when he was awake an hour early. Armed with a giant cup of coffee, he pressed the button to set the big monitor of the Apple Macintosh computer humming into life and opened the file he’d been working with on Friday afternoon.

Yet another ladies’ razor; yet another set of packaging. The customer’s name had to appear in Pantone 185. Everyone went for Pantone 185, widely accepted as the standard ‘I’m bright red – look at me!’ colour. He yawned and began to mess around with the background blue to make it greyer … better. Then added turquoise around the image of the razor to fizz it up a bit …

His desk phone rang. ‘Studio,’ he answered, economically.

‘It’s Neil, can I see you, please, Justin?’

‘On way.’ Justin groaned inwardly as he replaced the handset. That was all he needed the moment he got down to work. Neil wasn’t a bad bloke, OK for a manager, and a better manager than he’d been a graphic artist; but every ‘Can I see you, please?’ call was a potential elephant trap. Neil was only a couple of years older than Justin, but seemed to have embraced middle age with thinning hair, a thickening waistline and a diminishing sense of humour. Especially Justin’s brand of humour.

Neil’s office was designed to give customers a funky impression of Rockley: pearl carpet, inviting squashy grey leather chairs, ultra-blue window blinds and a desk of glass and tubular steel. From habit, Justin glanced at the pink-framed Rockley artwork dotting the walls as he lounged in. The cover of a brochure launching a line of dietary supplements was spotlit on the wall above Neil’s bulky left shoulder, a pastiche of sexy lime and calming pale blue overlaid with happy healthy faces in soft focus – a design of Justin’s.