Final Demand (7 page)

‘To be honest with you, I don't want to do this,' he said, following her into the kitchen.

‘Don't then.' She flashed him a smile. He felt a shifting sensation inside. ‘Let's have a cup of tea and forget all about it.'

She adjusted her towel – it was in danger of slipping. Colin felt a blush rising up his neck. The poor girl must be frozen. He took out his tools. ‘I'm ever so sorry,' he said.

‘There's nothing I can do to persuade you?'

His face reddened as he switched off the boiler (Potterton Suprema, 40,000 BTUs). ‘They'd only send somebody else and you'd pay another disconnection charge.'

‘They charge me for this? Great.' The tap hissed as she filled the kettle. ‘Oh well, if that's the case, I'd rather have you.'

As he turned off the main gas cock, he explained the procedure to her: how once the bill was paid she would have to make an appointment for a reconnection and there would be another charge for that. ‘It's daylight robbery,' he said, ‘downright senseless.' He heard the rattle of china. Was she doing it all with one hand?

‘It's just that I'm broke,' she said.

He got out his spanner. ‘They don't give a monkey's, these big outfits . . .'

‘They don't care if I freeze to death . . .'

‘Not a monkey's about ordinary folk . . .'

‘People like you and me. Sugar?'

‘Two, please.' He leant his weight against the spanner, pressing hard. The blooming union was stiff.

‘NT, where I work – you know it?' she asked. ‘They don't even send out a reminder. They send out a final demand and if the customer doesn't pay within seven days they cut them off, just like that, the tossers.'

He flinched at her language. ‘Don't I know it,' he replied. ‘They did it to me and a whole crate of tortoises died.'

‘Tortoises?'

Finally, he disconnected the pipe and capped it. ‘'Cos the bloke at the airport tried to ring me, see, and he couldn't get through.' He sat down heavily at the table. She passed him a mug of tea. ‘They know me there, the customs fellas at Manchester, they know I've got a way with them.' He pushed some crumbs into a pile. ‘Not wanting to blow my own trumpet, but I'm a bit of an expert. It's all down to, I suppose, that I like them and they like me.'

‘Who do?'

‘Tortoises.'

He looked up at her, his face ablaze with pity. ‘They're banned from being imported, it's illegal, but sometimes these crates arrive from these places, Turkey, places like that, and my pals in customs, they smell a rat—'

‘Or a tortoise—'

His eyes pricked with tears. ‘They're in a terrible state, half of them dead – dehydration, starvation. There was this crate last summer, fifty-four Hermann's tortoises, beautiful creatures . . .' His voice broke. ‘Only eleven responded to resuscitation.'

She gazed at him. ‘That's horrible.'

‘Cold-blooded murder. No other word for it. How could folk be so cruel?' He wiped his nose.

‘I love tortoises,' she said.

‘You do?'

She nodded. ‘Love them. Funny little shells and funny little faces. And so sort of . . . slow. In fact, I love all those kinds of animals.'

‘Reptiles, you mean?'

She nodded. ‘I adore them.'

‘Like, lizards?'

She nodded.

‘Snakes?'

She nodded again. The sun had come out; it flooded the kitchen with light.

He gazed at her wonderingly. ‘What about amphibians?'

‘What?'

‘Frogs and toads?'

She nodded. ‘Them too.'

The sun shone on her shiny, curly hair. It was the colour of his mother's treacle pudding. He realized, with surprise, that she was really pretty. ‘Never met a lass who liked frogs and toads.' He paused, overcome with emotion. ‘I breed them too.'

‘Where do you keep them?'

‘At home.'

She lit a cigarette, drew in the smoke and exhaled. He coughed. There was a silence as he shifted the crumbs into another pile. He thought: I'm alone with a nearly naked young woman. A wave of panic hit him. He climbed to his feet.

‘Better be p-p-pushing off.' He always stuttered at moments like these. Not that they came very often. ‘Now remember, you can't use your gas cooker either—'

‘Can I see them?'

He stared at her. ‘See what?'

‘Your frogs and toads and everything?'

Colin's jaw dropped. He gazed at her as she sat at the table. The towel was knotted expertly around her chest, leaving both of her hands free. She tapped ash into a saucer and smiled up at him.

‘You want to see them?' he asked, stupidly.

She nodded. Quite a lot of her chest was revealed. This, too, was scattered with freckles. Were all females this freckly? His experience was minimal; mostly limited, in fact, to the swimsuited girls he saw at the leisure centre. She was gazing up at him, her eyes bright, waiting for an answer.

He gathered his wits. ‘How about, you could c-come for tea,' he suggested. ‘Give her warning and me Mam'll bake us a cake.'

‘Who is she? What does she want?'

‘She wants to see me reptiles, Mam. She's that keen.'

His mother gave him one of her looks. He knew her face so well: grimly set, for the most part, but sometimes weather passed over it, like clouds or – more rarely – sunshine, darkening or lightening an outcrop of rock.

‘I said you'd bake her one of your sponges,' he added.

Colin was devoted to his mother. The thought of her dying, as she one day must, filled him with fathomless panic. They were everything to each other; they knew each other through and through. He would walk through fire to earn her approval. Oh, he had her love, he knew that, but sometimes it was an uphill struggle to please her. Life had been hard for Peggy, her husband and sisters dropping off one after another. There were just the two of them left, clinging to the raft.

He watched his mother as she opened the larder door. She moved slowly, her joints stiff, but he knew better than to help her. She put a bowl on the table and crumbled flour and butter together. Her knuckles were hugely swollen; she worked more slowly than usual. From the way she sat, rigid, he knew that she knew that this was something special. Already he could feel a loosening between them.

‘Don't stand there like a lump,' she said. ‘Go down the shop and buy me a couple of lemons.' She lifted the flour and let it fall through her fingers. It was graceful, the way she did it. ‘There's a good boy.'

It was the next day, Sunday. Natalie was due to arrive at four. Outside a gale blew. Next door's motor scooter had fallen over; its plastic cover snatched and billowed in the wind. Colin, propping it back on its stand, worried about Natalie, her thin frame freezing in her unheated flat. He couldn't get the image of her, all but naked, out of his head. What did she look like, dressed? He had kept his eyes lowered; he could hardly remember her face.

Colin wore his tartan shirt, freshly ironed by his mother, and
a clean pair of jeans. Waiting for Natalie, he saw his street through her eyes: the boarded-up windows, the single tree with a bin liner caught in its branches. The houses were dwarfed by the pylons that marched behind them, across the high ground. Nothing stirred except pieces of plastic; Rowton Crescent was sunk into the torpor of Sunday afternoon. Where were the kids? Colin had grown up here, he had played in the street with his gang. Nowadays children had disappeared like the lapwings on the upland meadows. Their cries were silenced.

Suddenly, powerfully, he wanted kids of his own. He longed for them, he longed to be a father, tying their little laces. The idea made his legs weak.

‘Come in, you'll catch your death!' his mother called.

He pretended not to hear – his own small rebellion. It was ten past four. He looked up and down the road. How would Natalie travel? By car? By the unreliable bus service from the centre of Leeds that stopped at the main road, six streets away? He should have offered to collect her, that was what people did.

But she wasn't coming anyway. The whole idea was too far-fetched. Natalie was a chimera, dreamed up in yesterday's sunlight. She didn't exist, she wouldn't come. Why should a young woman like her want to have tea with him anyway?

And then he heard it: the
thud-thud
of a sound system. It grew louder, pounding down the street as a silver Honda hove into view. It juddered to a halt beside him.

Natalie stepped out. Colin's heart turned over. How pretty she was! And quite different, fully dressed. In her flat she had looked maybe thirty years old. Alarmingly experienced, anyway. Now she seemed like a young girl arriving at a birthday party – buttoned-up coat, velvet band in her hair.

Indoors he helped her remove her coat. A powder-blue cardigan was revealed beneath. He glanced at the bumps of her breasts and closed his eyes. His mother came out of the lounge.

‘Hello, Mrs Taylor, I'm so delighted to meet you.' Natalie shook his mother's hand. ‘What a lovely home!'

There was a pause. Standing there, Colin felt clumsy and
male. Even his mother seemed to be wearing some sort of perfume, or maybe she had just squirted the hall. Guests made her conscious of the smell that lingered in the house; he himself never noticed it.

Natalie cocked her head, listening. ‘Is that a phone ringing?' she asked, frowning.

‘Oh,' said Colin. ‘That's crickets.'

‘Crickets?'

‘I feed them to the lizards.'

‘Ah.' She laughed. ‘They sound just like trill-phones, don't they?' She turned to his mother. ‘I work for a telecommunications company.'

Demure
, that was the word. She looked demure, and neat, and polite. Colin hadn't expected this, not from their first encounter, but then women were changeable creatures. You never knew where you were with them.

She was looking at a plate which hung on the wall. ‘That's so pretty, Mrs Taylor,' she said. ‘Did you buy it on your holidays somewhere?'

‘We don't go on holiday,' said his mother. ‘You'll see why soon enough.'

‘Tour first, or tea?' asked Colin.

‘Tea.' Natalie smiled at his mother. ‘I've heard you're a wonderful cook. I could eat a horse.'

If his mother was thawing, there was only the slightest of signs. Her wintry face gazed at Natalie, who took a third slice of cake.

‘Mmm,' she said, munching. ‘Wish I could bake things.' She glanced at Colin. ‘Not that I could at the moment anyway.'

‘He doesn't like cutting folk off,' said Peggy. ‘It's not in his nature.'

‘Oh, I'm not staying there long anyway.'

Alarmed, Colin asked: ‘Where are you going?'

‘I hate the city.' Natalie turned to his mother. ‘I'd like to move to the country, I adore the country – you know, animals
and flowers – that's where I really want to live. Besides, the city's no place for children.'

‘Children?' asked Peggy.

‘Well – you know – one day . . .' Natalie sipped her tea.

This moment of pensiveness over, she brightened. Sitting there, arms clasped around her knees, she asked Mrs Taylor about Colin's childhood.

‘What was he like?'

‘Such a soft-hearted boy, always looking after the smallest ones in the street.'

She asked Mrs Taylor about her husband. He was an embittered man who had lost his farm and who had worked, for an unhappy period, as part of the British Rail catering team. Peggy didn't tell her any of this.

‘He was a good man,' she said shortly.

Natalie offered to wash up; Peggy refused. As they left the lounge Colin whispered ‘Something tells me you've made a hit.'

He felt staggeringly intimate with her. Yesterday morning he hadn't known that Natalie had existed. She had popped up from nowhere and stepped into the centre of his life, wolfing down his mother's lemon sponge and interesting herself in things he had hardly noticed in fifteen years of living there. She was so vibrant; the house blazed with her presence. All his life he had been dozing and now he was jolted awake.

He led her upstairs, into his bedroom. The chirrup of crickets filled the air, louder here.

‘It's like being abroad!' she exclaimed. ‘Club Med or something.'

‘Club Med?'

‘Somewhere nice and sunny. Anywhere but Leeds.'

Cardboard egg-boxes were stacked on the shelf. These housed the crickets, until it was time to drop them into the terrariums. He pointed to a tank.

‘There's a mink frog in there. It's developed red-leg, that's a serious bacterial infection.'

The floor was crowded with pens filled with straw. He hadn't realized they covered such a large area of the room.

‘I call this the intensive-care unit,' he said. ‘There's two spur-thighed tortoises there,
testudo graeca
, they've got broken shells.'

‘You like rescuing things, don't you?'

‘In that one there's a monitor lizard that's poorly.'

She peered at the heap of straw. ‘Where?'

‘Better not disturb it.' He saw the bedroom through Natalie's eyes. For years he had been used to negotiating his way between the pens, from bed to washbasin, but now he saw how it might strike a stranger. He also noticed the powerful smell. ‘Mam kicks up a fuss but it's just temporary, till I build another shed.'

‘You've got more?'

‘Oh yes,' he said proudly. ‘These are just the invalids.' He led her downstairs. ‘What I really want is a python.'

‘A python?'

‘They make lovely companions but I don't have the funds, not as yet.' He chuckled. ‘Have to take out a mortgage for one of those.'

Opening the back door he had a strong desire, which he resisted, to take her hand. Instead he paused, with Natalie at his side, and surveyed his domain. It was impressive, no doubt about that. Sheds of various sizes lined one side of the garden; on the other side a large pond reflected the darkening sky. He led her to it. The perimeter was muddy; her shoes made a shy, sucking noise.