Lovers and Newcomers (35 page)

‘Come on then,’ he relented.

Outside, the cold stopped them in their tracks. Freezing air flooded into Amos’s mouth and nose, prickling the membranes, and shrinking the skin on his bones. The silence was vast. Jessie tilted her head and stared up into the blue-black sky.

‘Look at that,’ she breathed.

The stars were luminous, chains and clouds of them, with the brightest and hardest pinned to the faint swirls of the most distant like gems on a net skirt.

Her small chin pointed upwards. ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’

The Jaguar was the only car left in the car park. Amos pointed his key fob and the lights obediently blinked at the soft
clunk
of the central locking.

‘Hang on,’ Jessie said. She unlatched a side door and the dog bounded out. It leaped up at her, paws planted on her chest, tongue slathering her face. ‘
Raff
. Get down, you silly bugger.’

As soon as Amos opened the car door the dog bounded inside, treading in the embrace of the front passenger seat as if it planned to take up residence. Jessie piled in and shouldered the animal into the back seat. She settled herself and sighed with satisfaction as Amos swung towards Mead. The dog’s head projected between them. It clicked its jaws and the tongue flagged out, trailing drool over the leather upholstery. The tarmac of the road, hedges and dipped branches of trees all glimmered with damp.

‘I love this. It’s just such a brilliant car. You must be pretty pleased with it,’ Jessie murmured. She stroked the dashboard and the plump curves of the seats.

Amos felt embarrassed by her frank lust for it. ‘It’s just a car.’

She directed the way to a turning off the road to Mead. The headlamps lit up an overgrown gateway and a cottage beyond it. Rafferty barked once in Amos’s ear. Jessie opened the door and swung her legs out.

‘You can come in for a bit, if you want.’

Amos saw no reason not to. He had nothing to hurry home for. The garden was a crisped wilderness of sharp twigs and branches that stabbed at his face. He ducked to avoid them and his feet skidded on the slippery path.

Inside, there was a kitchen in a state not much more squalid than his own. A light bulb flickered and Rafferty slobbered at some leftovers in a dog bowl. Jessie made two mugs of instant coffee without offering Amos a choice. She jerked her head and he followed her across the hallway into a living room. There were music posters layered on top of ancient flowery wallpaper, and black cobwebs in the angles of the ceiling. Jessie dived at an electric fire on the hearth and switched it on. The two bars fizzed a little and then glowed, a tiny source of optimism in the icy room. The main items of furniture were two armchairs and a sofa covered in some bristly dun material.

‘It’s a bit shit, but it’s home. Isn’t it, Raff?’

The dog bounded past them, a streak of black elastic, and took one of the armchairs.

‘What happened to sit, and heel? You ought to train that animal. It would be a kindness.’

‘You dissin’ mah dawg?’ Jessie murmured, equably enough. She pressed a couple of buttons on an MP3 player and some kind of noodling, tinkling music seeped out of minute speakers. ‘Have a seat,’ she nodded. Amos chose the second armchair and Jessie plumped down on the sofa. They both kept their coats on. From an inner pocket she produced her Golden Virginia tin and began a complicated process of licking and gluing papers. Amos watched her, but in his mind he was transported a long way back to nights with Selwyn, and Blue Peony parties, and Miranda dancing in her tiny skirts and suede waistcoats. In his day, he had been an acknowledged master of this particular craft.

Jessie lit the twisted end and sucked in a deep lungful. She closed her eyes and blew out smoke, then extended her arm.

‘You want some?’

He took the joint from her and she grinned at him over the rim of her coffee mug.

‘You’re all right, you know, for an old bloke. Like at the Fifth bonfire. Kieran was dead lucky you were there. Not many people would have weighed straight in like that, against Donny Spragg and Damon and that lot. You probably didn’t have a clue what you were up against, did you? How’s your mate, by the way, with the burn?’

Amos blinked, trying to recall. Selwyn had now discarded all the dressings. The hair on one side of his head remained shaggy, on the other side it was rakishly stubbled, bisected by a livid red scar.

‘Um, he’s all right.’

Jessie regarded him. ‘You look pissed off tonight. What’s up?’

Amos thought. A long time seemed to pass, during which his mind ranged widely over the possible answers. In the end, the simplest seemed the best choice.

‘My wife left me,’ he said.

Jessie sniffed, turning down the corners of her mouth in a knowing way. She reached out for the joint.

‘Sorry. Why’d she do that?’

The room was losing its glacial chill. He unbuttoned his coat.

‘I’ve no idea.’ For no apparent reason, or a thousand accumulated ones, he could have said. After another extended interval he added, ‘She says she doesn’t want to live in the house we’re building.’

This information appeared to strike some sort of a chord with Jessie.

‘Do you remember at the Fifth there were people with placards? Some of them got up in woad or whatever stuff ancient tribes wore?’

For some reason quite large sections of Amos’s memory now seemed to be melting or collapsing into each other, much more calamitously than the usual sporadic noun- and proper name-loss, but he did retain quite a sharp mental picture of the group of middle-aged people toting a plastic skeleton and waving home-made signs to do with honouring history. He had been sitting with this girl on a hay bale, and she had regaled him with rather good stories about Meddlett people and their doings. Now, with the same relish, she told him that there was quite a big protest movement getting up in the village about incomers desecrating local heritage and sticking up great big houses that no one wanted there. Mrs Hayes was part of it, the one who had been arrested for setting fire to her neighbour’s shed, and Mrs Spragg in the shop, not Donny’s ma, his aunt, and quite a lot of others. A couple of them had been in the Griffin tonight, hadn’t he realized?

No, he hadn’t.

And, he pointed out, if they were talking pillage, it wasn’t he or anyone else he knew who had crept up in the middle of the night, hit an innocent guard over the head and robbed the locals as well as himself of the major portion of their shared heritage.

He was quite pleased with this response, in the circumstances, but Jessie dismissed it with a shake of the head. He had to realize what he was dealing with, although it was difficult for townies to understand the nuances. No one was that amazed the stuff had got nicked. It was either pikey locals or immigrants who had done it, it was what happened around here, but what everyone was really united against were Amos’s sort.

Anyway, Jessie continued, quite a lot of these placard people…

‘You mean, as distinct from the thief people?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

…believed that it was a mistake to have opened up the grave at all, just for some house to be built, let alone to have removed the bones from their ancient resting place and bundled them away. The stuff, gold and whatever it was, belonged to Meddlett. But people were quite superstitious, as well. There was a lot of talk about the grave-opening bringing bad luck.

‘As in crop failure? Plagues of boils? The curse of Mead?’

He laughed as he took a last long toke from the joint. Smoke scorched his throat.

Jessie looked narrowly at him and then started work on a fresh construction.

‘All right, you rip it as much as you like. I’m just telling you, that’s what some people think. And maybe, just maybe, this business with your wife is the start. Have you thought about that? Perhaps she’s superstitious too.’

The dog snored in its armchair. The room was definitely warm now.

Another eternity passed.

‘You could say that the bad luck started right away, with the robbery. The security guard certainly would,’ Amos mused.

‘Yeah.’

They lapsed into silence again. In some way, this inconclusive talk had eased his heart. Mentioning Katherine and listening to Jessie’s theory had helped to put her at a little distance. He found he could begin to contemplate an interval without her.

In fact the whole world had receded, he noticed, and his bewilderment at the events of the last few days along with it. He listened to the winding music with minute attention. It was nothing like ‘Crawling King Snake’, but it was all right. Jessie’s head was bent, and he could see the pale skin of her scalp where the hair parted. She was very pretty. They seemed to have been talking for hours, and he was gradually overcome with the desire to be closer to her. The odd tricks that time was playing made it easy to forget years. Not much had intervened, after all, since he sat in Selwyn’s college rooms respectfully listening to the new Doors album and watching Miranda Huggett twining her fingers in the air. It was the same, all the same. Time and age. What did they matter? Amos slid off his chair and went to sit beside Jessie on the sofa. His arm circled her shoulders. She sighed a little, and he took this as a good sign. He began to kiss her.

Jessie lunged away from him.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ she yelled.

The dog woke up. It leaped off the chair and came straight at him, snarling. Amos crouched, arms raised to protect himself, the blood draining from his face and flooding out of his ventricles. His heart squeezed and fluttered, apparently on thin air.

Jessie grabbed Rafferty’s collar and hauled him off.

‘Shit. Stop that. I’m fucking
sick
of it. Can’t I just sit and have a smoke and a bit of a talk with someone, anyone, without them sticking their tongue down my throat? Even an old man like you?’

She threw down the tobacco tin. There were tears in her eyes. She looked like nothing more than a little girl having a tantrum.

Amos felt a suffocating wave of humiliation. The flare of hearty lust died, leaving him shaking. A point of sudden and absolute clarity in the midst of his peripheral confusion told him that his career as a lover of women had just ended. All those lunches, the little drinks dates, the enjoyable rituals of the chase leading to the smooth necks to be kissed and the buttons straining to be undone, all now lay behind him.

He was old.

This was where his sexual life effectively finished, in a grimy cottage at the end of a lane with an electric fire giving off its dry red glare and a tattooed girl crying with anger at him. He was old. He had no work to absorb him, no colleagues or clerk of chambers or dinners, no wife, no point. Even the dope he had just enjoyed smoking was much too strong for him. He felt an overwhelming desire to sleep, and yet his limbs twitched like a marionette’s and his eyes burned in their sockets. He was old. He rolled his tongue experimentally in the dry cave of his mouth and managed to speak.

‘I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t mean it. No, I
did
mean it, but I wish I hadn’t.’

Jessie sighed.

‘All right. Forget about it. It happens all the time, right?’

To Amos’s relief the dog retreated. It settled on its haunches and began licking its rear end.

‘You look pretty awful,’ Jessie said.

Amos slowly nodded his head. The urge to sleep was like being sucked into a swamp. He was going deeper. The ooze compressed his ribcage, making it difficult to breathe. The walk to the car, the depths of cold, the drive back to Mead, all were beyond him. Jessie was standing now, looming above him as he wilted sideways into spilled ash on the sofa cushions. She picked up a blanket from the dog’s chair and folded it over him.

‘I want to ask you something.’

‘What?’ she frowned.

‘Will you show me…your tattoo. Please?’

She seemed very tall. Seven feet high. Her face was a long way off, solemn, as unmoving as if it were carved out of stone.

Silently she undid the buttons of her coat and let it drop. With her right hand she grasped the hem of her jersey and in one smooth movement she peeled off the top layer and several more that clung beneath. She was naked to the waistband of her jeans.

The tattoo was a fine, lacy pattern of leaves. It rose from the shadowed hollow of her waist to cover one breast, tapering away into the tendrils that showed at her throat. The density of it made the other breast look marmoreal.

Time did its expanding trick again, the membrane stretching to a taut dome, tighter and further, then collapsing with a whisper. Amos exhaled a long breath.

‘Thank you. That is…magnificent.’

Offhandedly she bent and scraped up her clothes.

‘I’ve been called a lot of things. Never that. Come on, Rafferty.’

The dog’s molten glare as it went by him was the last thing Amos saw before the swamp closed over his head.

When he woke up there was grey light filtering through layers of window grime, which meant that it was not early. The landscape of the night’s vivid dreams was temporarily more real than the confined space of Jessie’s living room. He was very cold, and when he tried to sit up cramp seized his back and neck. The sofa cushions had printed themselves into his cheek, and his mouth was full of sand. He would have liked to plunge back into sleep, but he was much too uncomfortable. He began a yawn but stopped before his head split in half, then slowly levered himself off the cushions and achieved a semi-standing position. The jagged pain in his frontal lobes subsided to a dull ache. Wrapping his coat around him he plodded to the kitchen in search of a cup of tea. There was an open box of teabags on a shelf, and a half-pint carton of milk in an otherwise almost empty fridge. The window looked out on a thick tangle of bare twigs and some medium-sized evergreens, each one furred with frost. As he stood in the silence, he could just hear a car swishing past on the Meddlett road. The cold of the lino tiles struck up through his socks.

The mugful of hot tea made him feel better. A further brief exploration brought him to a downstairs bathroom, painted a clammy green colour. He rinsed his face in warm water and sleeked back his hair. When he returned to the kitchen the dog was there, licking up and crunching some sort of dry biscuit from its bowl. To his relief, it ignored him. He made himself a second mug of tea and as he drank it he heard footsteps overhead. A moment later Jessie descended the stairs. She was wearing a blue dressing gown like a child’s. She looked altogether childlike, blinking and frowning at him. She seemed too young and vulnerable to be living alone in this bleak cottage.