Let's Dance (24 page)

He watched her closely, wondering why exactly she had become so brittle and what it was such news might provoke in her. Anger? Amazement? Relief? Robert Burley was reported to have expressed the first two, while she seemed indifferent. He wished she would open her arms instead of hugging them to her chest, let him melt some of this fierce and secretive resentment.

‘Oh, I collected the post,' he said. Three letters.

‘Mine,' said Serena, grabbing them with the speed the dog took a titbit.

Andrew watched. He felt as if his fingers had been bitten.

‘Mine,' said Isabel, seizing Serena's wrist, squeezing hard until Mother's fingers succumbed and she gave a sharp shriek of pain. Her protest was not coupled with surprise. It was as if such treatment had become commonplace. Andrew did not like what he saw, Isabel hugging rage and fear against her ribs, her face as sharp as a beak.

Y
ou can go home now, George Craske, for a day or two, and bad luck to you. Don't shake my hand, will you? Come back the day after tomorrow, or we'll come looking.

What have we done to you? Nothing, in any obvious sense. Oh, they could have been violent, but then George's own experience of the police, admittedly not recent by any manner of means, had never included rough stuff. Persistence to the point of tears, yes, violence as such, no; he had never even feared it. All they had done before giving up in disgust was to use a kind of malevolent chumminess to turn his life inside out and leave the raw nerves of it exposed. About those previous convictions, Georgie Boy? You were a cook, weren't you? Yes, for a works canteen. Could do with you in ours, Georgie. Three works canteens, wasn't it? Two arrests for thieving from your employers. Then there was that girl in the third, amazing you could get another job, wasn't it, but I suppose way up north they might not be fussy about someone who can actually cook what real men eat during the night shift. Is that right, George?

He could feel himself beginning to weep. Felt grateful for that little hostel room where anything of value was already gone and there was never any point in saving things, not like his other rooms in olden, golden days, stuffed with items he might just need later: packet soup, tins, foil containers, napkins, towels; things which even he could see no logical reason to steal. I had a hungry childhood, he said. Not much of an explanation to the supervisor in the last set of kitchens. He'd taken a shine to her and been ignored, ain't that right, George? Like Isabel Burley, is it, George? Like the teapot in your car? We know you're a thief. The question is, how much of one?

‘No!' he shouted. Although, perversely, it calmed him. At least they had got something totally wrong. Reassuring, that. Don't touch me.

So why did you rape her, George? Why do that to the poor girl? He could still hold on to the way they had not got their facts quite right, because it had not been a girl, not as such. A mature woman who'd given him the wink, put him on the day shift to be under her eye, although the crowds and the noise drove him witless. He couldn't talk to her, couldn't explain. Whichever God allocated vocabulary had been unkind to him. Can't talk, George, that's your problem. Haven't got the words.

You told her a lot, George. Actions speak louder than words, don't they? She came and found me after dark. A pound of bacon in my bag. There'd been an argument, end of shift. Waiting in line to be checked
out, leaving me last. They had music on in there all day. Wasn't a man worked there didn't shout and scream. Pay was awful too, we were expected to steal things. See? She did see. She was a nice woman. I hit her with something and found myself giving her one. Last time I ever gave anyone one, if you take my meaning. Never again, I swear, and never on a kitchen floor. Although, God knows, my life's been spent in kitchens. Poor cow. She was going to shop me and I thought she liked me. Thought it would put things right, and it went too far.

Women are a bit difficult, George, aren't they? You did hit her quite hard. I mean, no one could have said she was consenting. Not what with being unconscious at the material time. I suppose she moaned in appreciation, did she, George? Brutal rape, it says here. You even pleaded guilty. Your sort of bastard stops at nothing.

Don't know what you mean, George said. He didn't. The translation of ethics from one offence to another made no sense to him. Couldn't they see? A petty thief and a haunted, limited man did not automatically meld into other forms of dishonour. They did see. They believed him, literal men that they were. Questions about friends were met with the same confusion. Questions at the hostel, indifferently conducted since everyone was bored by now, seemed to reveal a welcome, if friendless, inmate who cooked. Not a skill common with burglars.

So that was what he was. A harmless little rapist with a connection to a burgled house. The sort of face
and boyish hair for whom some mad old lady might invent the friends which a sweet motherly woman like that might wish him to have.

Not the violent, claustrophobic man who walked into the ice-cold air in search of Derek. Derek, who would survive any questions, the reformer's dream, because he was never short of the words. Derek would hit a princess and walk away with an explanation about a cupboard door attacking him on the way out. Derek made shit smell of roses. He had no scars. Mr Milk Froth. Pimply, purply rat-haired fuck of a cunt, was he.

The one thing they had done was give him back his dictaphone.

T
he warden looked at him with sorrowful opprobrium, told him his room had been searched. He knew, did he not, that his tenure in it was temporary, dependent on him not being charged with another criminal offence. Sod off, George told him, I've not been charged and I won't be either. Have you seen Derek? The man looked at his watch. Oh, he'll be away at his work, now. They brought back your car and he borrowed it. That's what I want to see him about, George said, neutrally. The warden was proud of Derek. Kept himself smart. He did not know that he was facing in George the only criminal he might ever meet who had accepted what he had done and was sorry for it.

George was hungry. He supposed, quite irrelevantly, that the only bonus of a couple of days in police
cells was not spending money on food. Not that this kind of hunger was the same as the desire to eat; he did not want to give himself that kind of comfort, slow himself down, stop him jogging past the neat little houses into town.

Fog was wreathing around the old church hall near what used to be the railway station. It added anonymity to the innocence of daylight. George knew he would find Derek there, because a sense of justice informed him that that was the way it should be, simply on account of the fact it was his turn for something to go right. He had told himself that all he wanted to do was ask Derek why? Why steal the furniture and drop him in it? Why pick that particular house and not another?

Fate was kind enough to deliver him Derek without allies. Everyone else gone, and him left in charge of the shop. The boss at home, nursing stiff legs and business was slack, anyway, the way it was as soon as people got a sniff of Christmas. Seeing Derek, whistling at the back, ignoring the creak of the door, George paused for a moment to wonder what anyone would ever want with all this stuff. To live in such confusion: a warehouse full of furniture was something disgusting when he considered how futile it was and how empty that room of Serena's had been. Furniture with numbers on, waiting to be possessed, made no sense.

Derek, still whistling, pushed his bantamweight against a table, getting it lined up with the next thing. Gave it a wipe with a cloth, totally absorbed when
George hit him. So much for questions and conversation.

It could not end there: Derek was too quick, too strong, to be stunned by a blow on the back of his head. He pretended was all, falling across his table until George tried to drag him off, then whirling round and pushing a foul-smelling rag into George's face. Hitting him below the belt, encountering rock, opening his mouth to speak, his wet, red lips forming an O. George smacked him in it, followed through to the ribs. Trust Derek to raise his hands to protect his pretty face, serve him right. He was soft in the stomach; all his power was in his head, that filthy little brain of his.

He butted George, catching his forehead with agonizing accuracy, so that George saw redder than ever. Kicked away at Derek's shins, so that he fell among a pile of chairs, screaming. One of the chairs seemed to explode into a series of legs. George took one and hit Derek in the lower part of his face. He used the wood like a hammer. More than once. He was not counting.

Something crashed in the corner of the room. The furniture was closely and unsteadily stacked, the floor uneven. The shiver of breaking glass from a capsized wardrobe door stopped all other movement, so shocking was the sound. Without thinking, George dragged Derek in that direction. There was blood on his hands. There was the dim thought that if he placed Derek and wardrobe together, the damage might appear accidental, provided no one looked closely. Derek's jaw
hung crooked, broken, teeth smashed. There would not be much by way of words coming out of that gob for a while.

Or ever? George listened for the sound of breathing, heard the rattling. He had his heel poised to stamp on the jaw, hesitated, stopped. Didn't particularly want him dead.

Someone would be in soon. No one left junk like this unguarded for long. He took his car keys from Derek, which felt, oddly, like some kind of theft, taking something out of someone's pocket, and it was then he began to see the enormity of what he had done, the sheer, bloody-minded stupidity of it. It was not even as satisfying as he had imagined, this transitory sweetness of revenge. Five minutes ago he could have defended himself against the world. Now he could not. Ten minutes since he could have said he was still a free man. Now he could not. There was a set of overalls hanging on a hook in the back office. Huge, made for a bigger man than he, covered the blood nicely.

Then he was out of there, remembering the car but wanting to run. Back to the hostel. Looking at the wreckage of the room. Took his spare sweaters and the old boots that no one else had wanted, stuffed into a polythene bag. Left an old envelope from the hall on his bed, bearing the legend, ‘Gone to relatives'. Chance would be a fine thing. If his relatives existed George did not know them. The message seemed sadly dishonest, so he changed it. ‘Gone home.' People could impute whatever meaning they liked to that. He
felt uncharacteristically clever as he walked out into the darkness, a clever fool with the mark of Cain branded on his forehead.

Into a car which smelt of Derek and the sense of nowhere to go.

T
he trouble with kindness was that it had to be first earned and then repaid. Isabel did not like these kind of debts. It was death to self-respect to begin and go on owing someone something. She could not accept that as her due. There was a nagging feeling which made her feel that she owed Andrew something, just as she owed the world, as if she still had to explain herself, justify her existence. Muddled it was, but she could not accept generosity with grace, even on behalf of someone else. She did not want victim support, either: it made her feel like a victim. She wanted the whole lot of them out of her hair, but tea must be made, biscuits produced, the situation talked about, as if the theft of belongings had been the most important thing about the invasion. She shivered. She was always cold. She made all the right, hospitable moves and would not let anyone around her settle.

And when they were gone she looked at the letters. A formulaic, citizens' charter type letter for Ma from the Electricity Board, an inventory of things stolen from Robert, and a letter from Joe. Mother waved from her new chair by the fire, struggled to get up. The sight of paper coming out of envelopes seemed to enrage her.

‘Darling!' she yelled.

‘Don't darling me.' Isabel plonked into her lap three of the largest books with torn pages, sufficient to weigh her down into her seat without doing damage. Enough to get several minutes' respite while the poor old sweetheart worked out a way to get them off her knees and on to the floor while darling daughter retired to the kitchen. Perhaps a letter from Joe would change the universe. Give the greyness a tinge of pink, if that could be imagined. Lift the afternoon fog. Stop everything from being animal, vegetable and mineral.

A
series of pictures rose into her mind in a rising tide of panic. What would he think of this place, the patrician grandeur of it, the lack of any kind of amenity he held dear? The second image was Aunt
Mab saying out loud, this one is not worth his salt, my niece is worth far better, my niece is the price of rubies. She shoved that image away along with the first. Thought instead of Joe climbing all over her like a man faced with the Matterhorn, protesting allegiance to no other cliff face. The shivering of cold began again. All those bloody exclamation marks. Shallow, Mab was shouting: men are as shallow as puddles. Isabel finally felt nothing but a lethargic sadness. A fog of melancholia which mirrored the garden outside. Until she heard her mother shouting. Torn books had a use after all. They were fuel for the fire, which sparked and caught the edge of Serena's long corduroy skirt. The hem was smouldering into a half-hearted flame.

Isabel seized her under the shoulders, hauled her upright where she stood uncertainly, grabbing the mantelpiece while her daughter stripped the skirt from round her middle. Plumped her gasping mother back down in the damn chair, chucked the skirt on the fire, knelt at her feet and checked her legs for damage. Nothing. She could have used that big, heavy skirt as a fire screen, or blackout curtains. Sitting in suspenders and heavy stockings beneath faded silk drawers, Serena looked ludicrous. She spoke urgently, reached out her hand. The shock was not going to kill her. The screams were more rage than fear.