No Place For a Man (25 page)

‘And we’ve both had facials and our nails done,’ Zoe said, holding out her hands to be inspected. ‘I’ve had a French manicure. Tash’s are a really gross blue.’

‘It is not gross,’ Natasha snapped at her. ‘It’s choice. I love it.’ She stared down at her nails, admiring the blue which was exactly the near-turquoise, Jess thought, of her i-Book computer at home. It seemed strange to think that the whole day was merely supposed to be material for a magazine piece. It felt more important than that, almost as good as a holiday, certainly far more durable, as if this was an important load-bearing brick in the family structure. Natasha seemed close to normal again, though sometimes Jess
could catch a look of fleeting worry on the girl’s face. It was to be expected really, she thought: Tom was Natasha’s first proper boyfriend and it could hardly be painless that she wasn’t going to be seeing him again.

George finished sweeping out the shed and hung the brush away on its hook just to the left of his second favourite spade. He liked order in his surroundings. He liked small rituals like lifting the dahlias every November when the flowering was over and storing them under sacking just as his father had taught him to do all those years ago. Hardly anyone bothered lifting dahlias these days, he thought as he lit the camping-gas stove to boil water for his tea. It was all to do with global warming and not getting proper winters any more. We get the same old summers though, it occurred to him; they couldn’t have got that much better or people wouldn’t keep harping on about the summer of ’76.

The boy was back again. George watched from the shed window as Tom stashed the boxes in the boot of the old Sierra. He might, he thought, have a quick look in there later. After all, the car wasn’t going anywhere: two of the wheels had gone missing and the other two had flat tyres. It was the sort of thing people phoned the council about; perhaps they had. But with the council being all for getting rid of the allotment holders they were probably hoping there’d be thousands of old cars dumped there so they could clear the land of both cars and gardeners in one greedy go.

Of course it could all be Tom’s worldly goods, George speculated as he kept watch from the shed. He hoped that was all it was, in the boxes. Ever since Val’s shed was broken into he’d had his reluctant suspicions
about the boy. He wanted to think well of him. He was nice enough, didn’t mind hard work, had manners to charm anyone and he’d not had an easy time. Somewhere along the line someone had put in the foundations of a good upbringing and one day he’d have no trouble talking his way into a decent job that would take him places, just so long as he was cleaned up a bit. And so long as he kept out of trouble.

Tom slammed the boot of the car shut. He wouldn’t be able to lock it, George knew, he certainly wouldn’t have a key. Nor, it crossed his mind reluctantly, might he have a key for the blue Peugeot parked just beyond the fence. Tom strolled over to it and climbed in. The car hiccuped and over-revved and then was off, tyres squealing as the lad put too much pressure on the accelerator. George shook his head and went back to his tea-making. It was all very well hoping for the best. It didn’t mean you were going to get it.

‘You’re not serious, are you Dad? Please don’t be!’ Zoe pleaded with Matt from the back of the car. She peered into the driving mirror, trying to see if he was joking or not.

‘It’s just too gnarly to think about.’ Natasha shuddered. ‘You mean you’re going to spend all your days handling dead bodies? What am I supposed to put on forms where it says “parents’ occupation”?’

‘Well your mother’s a journalist, you can put that. You can leave me out if you’re that bothered. Undertaking’s a noble calling,’ he told them. ‘And there’s always a demand for it. The one job that isn’t ever going to be short of business. Especially with the baby-boomer generation getting older. All the acid casualties will be off on their final big trip.’

They were just coming into the Grove, passing the Leo. There were tables outside now that it was getting warmer, and Eddy was sprawled across one, reading a newspaper.

‘I’m not sure I’d want Eddy attending to my last rites,’ Jess murmured.

‘Actually,’ Matt admitted as he pulled up outside the house, ‘the hands-on bit is the one part I don’t reckon we’ve quite thought through. I don’t think any of us are going to want to get involved with any of that. We’ll have to employ people, then sit back and count the cash.’

Jess unlocked the front door and went in. There was a pile of mail on the mat and as she bent to pick it up she noticed a mobile phone lying at the bottom of the stairs. Assuming it was Natasha’s she put it on the hall table.

‘Because really I think we were thinking along the lines of superficial decor and design, not …’ Matt, still on the topic of his proposed new career, was saying as he walked past her into the sitting room. ‘Er, Jess? What’s going on in here?’

Jess, Natasha and Zoe followed him into the room. It looked quite still and tidy, nothing different was immediately obvious.

‘The telly, it was here wasn’t it? You haven’t moved it? And the video?’ Matt asked.

‘Have we been burgled?’ Zoe’s eyes were wide with both fear and excitement.

‘I’m not sure.’ Matt looked puzzled. ‘Jess’s computer is still here. Anyone with any sense would have taken that, it’s small enough.’

Zoe ran upstairs to check her room, shrieked loudly then yelled down, ‘
My
computer’s gone! And my CD
player! And someone’s been in Oliver’s room. I can sort of
smell
them.’ Zoe’s face, her eyes full of tears, appeared over the banisters. Natasha rushed up the stairs past her and went into her room.

Matt raced around the house, checking for what was missing. ‘Upstairs television, the Magimix of all things, both radios, the kitchen CD player,’ he reported. ‘What about you, Tash? What’s gone from your room?’

Natasha looked quickly round her room. She didn’t need to really, she knew nothing would be missing. Her window was open, the curtain flapping lazily in the warm breeze. She could smell him too. She breathed in slowly, taking in the slightly smoky, leathery scent. While her parents thought she was still checking for what was stolen, she picked up the phone extension on the landing and dialled ‘Henry Reid’s’ number. No-one was answering. She could hear another phone ringing, somewhere downstairs, then getting closer as someone came up towards her.

‘If I answer this, I get the feeling I’ll be talking to you,’ Jess said, holding out the ringing mobile to Natasha.

Natasha didn’t feel any different about Tom. She tested herself, asking herself if it was different now that he’d done this thing. She tried thinking of it as a violation of their home (her mother’s over-dramatic description), as a sign that he didn’t really give a flying fuck about her (her father’s more down-to-basics view) and she still wanted more than anything to get out of the house and be with him, curled up together down by the railway on the warm gravelly place next to the track where the embankment was scuffed away making a hollow. Sitting there with him, cuddling tight against his leather jacket when the trains whistled by and whooshed up the wind, she felt like a fox safe in the earth. Now her parents thought he was the complete pits, the scummiest grub on the planet, even worse than they’d thought before, she knew he had to have someone on his side. There wasn’t anyone else so it had to be her. He was her responsibility. She thought, fleetingly, about Mel but he’d insisted Mel was just a
friend, just someone he talked to now and then, bummed cigarettes from, gave a lift to, nothing special.
She
, Natasha, was the one that mattered. He hadn’t taken anything from her room. He hadn’t even taken her mother’s computer. Tentatively, she’d tried to suggest that that showed a little bit of respect, only to be silenced by the thunderously furious look on her father’s face. Zoe wouldn’t stop crying. She said it wasn’t about losing her stuff, which made it even worse because Natasha couldn’t really work out what it
was
about.

Natasha sat on her bed and tried to feel something that wasn’t just misery. When you loved someone you had to go along with it. You couldn’t just choose which bits of them to like, the power of your feelings wouldn’t let you, you were stuck with the whole package. The trouble was, she loved her family too. It hurt that her dad had such a disappointed look on his face. When the police came, one of them had asked if she knew where Tom was. She’d said no, and her father had given her that look, as if he didn’t believe her. That was really painful. ‘I’m not a liar!’ she’d yelled.

‘How can we be sure, any more? We told you you couldn’t see or contact him, but you obviously have been,’ her mother had said, so very coldly. It wasn’t fair. She really didn’t know where he was. She only wished she did, then she could go to be with him – and this time she’d be packing for more than just one night away. Anyone would think it was
her
who’d done the burgling. She honestly couldn’t remember, when they’d asked her, if she’d said anything to Tom, whether she’d told him they’d all be out. Telling him they were all off on a jolly family outing wasn’t the sort of conversation they had. Anyway what difference
would it have made, she’d wanted to say, (but daren’t): when Tom decided to get in somewhere he was quite capable of choosing his own moment. If it hadn’t been today it would have been some other time. She even sneaked into both bathrooms to check for newly wet towels, just in case he’d taken a few minutes to have a shower while he had the chance.

‘So much for being grounded,’ Matthew said to Jess after the pair of sombre and not particularly optimistic policemen had gone and Natasha had stalked off to her room. ‘She must have thought it was well cool, sneaking out to meet him on the sly like that. It must have been like a game to them.’

‘Yes. Very romantic. Perhaps we shouldn’t have tried to stop her seeing him, then it wouldn’t have been so exciting.’ Jess was clearing away all the mugs still half full of tea that they and the police had drunk. Making tea had seemed, as with a family death, the thing to do. No-one had really wanted any. The police officers had sipped politely at it as if it was not only part of their duty but their fourteenth of the day. Matt was now helping himself to a beer from the fridge. ‘It’s almost frightening that she can be so wilful and so secretive. Do you think it was Tom who burgled Clarissa’s house as well? I mean he’s so young, shockingly young to be making a living at it, surely.’

‘There’s a lot of it about, so Plod said. We were lucky the police bothered to come at all. It was only because we had a name we could give them.’

‘Well, we
thought
we did. Like they said, it might not be his real name: he could be called anything and even then they still have to prove it was him. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned fingerprint taking? I
got the impression that with this kind of crime, they’ve given up on it before they’ve started.’

Jess, in spite of her anger at having the house burgled, was rather touched that her computer had been left behind. It might have been an oversight, though of all the light electrical household goods he could have chosen, the pretty little i-Book was probably the most sellable item, and certainly one of the most valuable. If Tom had taken that, plus any of Natasha’s possessions and not dropped the mobile phone, there was every chance that they might not have connected him with the theft.

‘He’s not very good at it, is he?’ Jess smiled as she opened a beer for herself. (Why did men do that? she thought, always assume that beer was such a male drink that women didn’t need to be offered one.) ‘If he’s going to make a career of crime he’ll have to learn not to let any lingering good manners and inconvenient scruples get in the way.’

‘Better that he gets caught now, in that case,’ Matt said, ‘before he turns old and hard and becomes the sort who ransacks every room, pours bleach over the carpets and shits on the bed.’

‘You were still seeing him. They told you you couldn’t and you just went straight out and did it.’ Zoe, confronting Natasha in her room, was trying not to feel tearful again with anger.

‘Sorry. I should have told you.’ Natasha was lying on her bed, her hair sticking to the tears on her face.

‘I didn’t
want
to bloody know!’ Zoe shrieked, picking up a shoe and hurling it at her sister.

Surprised, Natasha sat up and rubbed her head where the shoe had so accurately landed. ‘What’s your
problem then? Why don’t you leave me alone?’

‘The problem’s you! You’ve gone really horrible! It’s like you’re not the same person any more and I hate it! Why do you like him more than you like us? He’s really bad news and you can’t even see it!’

Natasha lay down on the bed again and rolled over, turning her back on her sister. ‘You just don’t understand. It’s how I feel about him.’

‘Well
stop
feeling it then. Be like you were before.’

‘I can’t,’ Natasha muttered. ‘I’m older now, it’s what happens. You wait till it’s you.’

‘Me? I think I’ll be better at choosing. I
know
I will be.
I
wouldn’t go out with some creepy thief who climbs in people’s windows.’

‘I’ve made a chicken and mushroom pie.’ Angie was at the front door holding an oblong dish covered with a tea towel. ‘I thought you might not feel like cooking.’ Angie had been on the phone to see what was going on before the police car had turned its flashing blue light off.

Jess led her through to the kitchen and the pie was placed on the table. All by itself beneath its cloth on the otherwise empty table there was something vaguely sacramental about it.

‘That’s so sweet of you, Angie. I hadn’t even thought about food.’

‘It’s nice to have someone to cook for, especially someone who’ll actually eat it and not sneak out to throw it up again. The bad news is I’m going to stay and share it with you.’

‘Of course.’ Jess looked at the newly blank space beside the kettle. ‘He took the Magimix as well, you know. I mean what will he do with that? You can
hardly sell those down the pub.’

‘Car boot, small ads, Internet if he’s got access – which he probably has, by way of your Zoe’s computer. He’ll sell it all right, the little sod.’ Angie went to the fridge, pulled out a half-full bottle of white wine and poured them both a drink. It really was as if someone had died, Jess thought, having neighbours calling in with essential supplies and making free with your kitchen. It was immensely comforting.