Rough Treatment (17 page)

“Out?”

“As in, over and.”

Grabianski lifted a piece of green pepper with his chopsticks, dipped it into black bean sauce, then bit into it, thoughtfully. “How come?”

“Sources,” said Grice.

Grabianski looked at his bowl, the dishes resting on hotplates. “What’s wrong with them?”

“Drag your mind from your stomach a minute. Up to now they’ve been—what d’you call it?”

“Impeccable.”

“Now I’m not so sure. I think a couple more at most.”

Laughter rose from the round table near the center of the room, coarse and loud, and echoed, one diner to another. Voices raised, the clatter of dishes as a hand came slamming extravagantly down. From the corner of his eye, Grabianski saw the manager appear at the far end of the screen.

“And then?”

“What d’you mean, and then? Like always, we scarper.”

Grabianski sipped jasmine tea. “How about this flat? Didn’t you tell her three months minimum?”

“I told her what she wanted to hear.”

A black woman walked in with a white escort, guided by the waitress towards their table. From the middle of the restaurant rose the unmistakable chant of the British football fan, the repeated sound of supposed chimpanzees.

“Banana fritters for that one!”

The laughter was raucous and harsh. The couple pretended not to hear.

“You know what I feel about unnecessary risks,” said Grice. “What we’ve always felt. It’s why we’ve kept clear of the law for as long as we have.”

“I know,” said Grabianski. He was thinking about something Maria had whispered into the side of his neck, the tip of her tongue moving over his skin: “Jerry, if I could have one thing in the world, it’d be to be able to do this, with you, forever.” Grabianski didn’t believe in forever, not even in the afterglow of good sex, but he did believe in a year, nine months.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Grice.

“Nothing.”

They both knew it was a lie.

The largest of the group around the middle table got to his feet. Like them he was white and male, but older than the rest. Forties, even. The others were not so many years out of school, a few of them still on YTS.

“Feeding time,” called the man. He had a short, square haircut, a black bomber jacket with red-and-green bands around the sleeves. He lifted one of the dishes from the table in front of him and tossed the entire contents high through the air, towards the couple who had just entered.

“Please …” The dinner-jacketed manager started towards them.

The black woman wiped rice from her shoulder, the sleeve of her dress. The man with her was on his feet and glaring; all of the blood seemed to have drained from his face.

“Come on, then, sunshine!”

“What’s the matter, nigger-lover? Don’t like the service?”

The waitress moved in front of the shaking customer, placing both hands on his chest. “Sit down, sir,” she said. “Pay no attention.”

Another plate of food struck her back, caught in her hair.

“Please …” urged the manager.

One of the men swung a fist from where he was sitting and punched him low in the stomach and he sank to his knees, groaning.

“Fetch the police,” called one of the other customers.

“Shut your fucking mouth!”

Two, then three Chinese appeared from the kitchen, wearing short white jackets, white aprons; one of them carrying a carving knife, another a broom handle.

Grice watched Grabianski go tense, straighten his arms against the edge of the table.

“Jerry, stay out of this.”

The waitress ran diagonally across the room; maybe she was heading for the phone, maybe she simply wanted to get away. She tripped over an outstretched leg and lost her footing, arms flailing until she collided with the metal edge of the screen. Spinning away before she fell, the blood was already pumping from a cut over her eye.

“Jerry!”

The leader of the gang reached down into a sports bag by his feet and flourished an ax.

“Keep out of this,” hissed Grice.

Grabianski didn’t look back at him; he was watching the blade of the ax. “How?” he said. The man wielding the axe lifted it high over his head before bringing it crashing through the table. Three of his friends took hold of the manager, arms and legs, and tossed him head first against the glass screen, cracking it across.

Grabianski had hung his suit jacket over the back of his chair; now he slipped his watch from his wrist and set it down between the chopsticks and his cup of jasmine tea.

The youth who’d tripped the waitress was twisting an arm up behind her back and trying to tear away the top of her dress. Grabianski began to move through the mêlée towards them, three coins tight between the knuckles of his fist.

Harold Roy gripped the sides of the toilet bowl and slowly lowered his forehead until it was resting on the cool of the porcelain. How could they say there was something wrong with cocaine when, whatever it left you feeling, it was never like this? He knew, just knew, that come morning he was going to feel like death.

Maria pushed open the bathroom door, took one look, made a retching sound and went away. Life without Harold; devoutly to be wished. She went into the bedroom, laughing. What was she doing, remembering that? Chester Playhouse—or was it Salisbury?—and her one and only Ophelia. Well, to be honest, she had been an ASM, understudying Ophelia and the Queen both. Twice she got to sing those childish chants and wander round the stage with fake flowers threaded through her hair. Afternoon matinees with schoolkids pelting each other with peanuts and Maltesers and the noise so great it wouldn’t have mattered if she hadn’t remembered a single line.

The rest of the time she helped the dresser, shifted scenery, made sure the swords were in the right place for the duel and learned everybody else’s words as well as her own.

Not alone my inky cloak, good madam, nor customary suit of solemn black.

How many people, she wondered, would bother to turn out for Harold’s funeral? They’d probably get Mackenzie to write two paragraphs for
The Stage.

That the funeral—how did it go?—the funeral, dum-di-dum, sweetmeats, bakemeats make up the marriage feast.

Jerzy Grabianski.

Jerry.

Harold came to the doorway and leaned against it, sagging. His eyes found Maria and tried to focus. No, you don’t, you bastard! Maria thought. I won’t pity you. I’m damned if I will!

He lurched three paces into the bedroom and stopped.

“Harold,” she said.

“Hmm?”

“There’s something I’d better tell you.”

Sixteen

Resnick pushed at the door. Something stopped it and it would open no further.
He had tried to sleep twice already, the downstairs settee, the shores of his own double bed. All of the usual strategies: the whisky and milk, the music, what he imagined at third remove to be relaxation exercises, stillness that cleared the brain. As possible as removing each last trace of blood from the boards, worked and worried into the grain. Inside the room, his fingers touched the walls, the paper’s slight give, layer upon layer, sheet upon sheet. If he stood there long enough he would be able to smell it, stubborn as fragments caught beneath a nail. He looked at his hands.
What seemed like pieces of him.
During his marriage this room had meant babies: the possibility of life. Later, when his relationship with Rachel had ended, it had given birth to something else. Always a bloody business.

Why, for instance, do you want to move?

Oh, Christ!

Resnick closed the door behind him; there was a lock, he needed the key. Rachel. What had she called it?
A womb with a view.
Hadn’t she been coming there that day to say to him, hold on, back down, goodbye? It had been a simple enough story: a murderer who had visited his house to what? Confess? Exact a little penance? Five Hail Marys and a blade with a blunt, serrated edge. There were those, Resnick believed, for whom life was a matter of steps, delicate and small. Along the corridor, up and down the stairs, the rest of the house awaited him.

Jack Skelton picked up his cup and stretched his limbs. When they had moved into this house out in the suburbs there had been something good about its proportions. Suitable. He and his wife had looked at his superintendent’s salary, the entries in their building society accounts, his and hers. The proper calculations. It would be, they both agreed, their last move. Even after the children had left home, they would want somewhere large enough for them to visit, bring their husbands, wives, grandchildren.

The clock stood between small framed photographs above the wide fireplace. Twenty past one. Alice had already come down and asked him to go back to bed. “She won’t have a thing to say when she does get in.” Skelton had quit pacing the L-shaped room, lounge and dining-space combined; he had looked back at his wife and raised his eyebrows, an annoying gesture he had been trying to cure himself of since a cadet; raised his eyebrows and nodded. “In a while.”

Alice had turned back to the stairs, gone to their bed alone.

Skelton walked now past the dining table, through the sliding door into the kitchen; his hand against the side of the kettle showed it to be still warm. Instant coffee was in a jar above the fitted hob. There were no longer buses running and he wondered how his daughter would be getting home. He did not allow himself to consider she might not return, that night, at all.

“Kate.”

Skelton woke to the sound of the key turning in the lock. He had fallen asleep in the chair and there was an after-memory, recent, the muffled noise of a car drawing up and pulling away.

“Katie.”

She turned to face him from the foot of the stairs. Her hair had been hacked short for some months now and tonight it was greased into abrupt, frozen spikes. Her face was pale, save for lips painted black. She wore a black T-shirt over skin-tight black trousers; a black leather jacket dripping with crosses and gothic impedimenta. A cartridge belt, empty, hung loose over one hip; white socks led to black winkle-picker shoes that were beginning to crease upwards at the tips.

One foot on the bottom tread of the stairs, a hand to the banister, she glared at him, head erect, the epitome of tough.

“I fell asleep,” Skelton said.

“Down here?”

“I was waiting …”

“I know what you were doing.”

“I was worried.”

“Yeah.”

“We were worried, your mother …”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“What you were going to say, don’t say it.”

“You’re being very unfair …”

“And she doesn’t give a shit about me, so don’t you pretend that she does.”

“Katie!”

He moved towards her fast, one arm raised: hit her or hold her?

The girl narrowed her eyes and stared him down: two months past sixteen.

“Coffee,” said Skelton, stepping back.

“What?”

“Coffee. I could make us some coffee.”

She looked at him, incredulous, and laughed.

“We could talk.”

Kate shook her head.

“All right, then, just sit.”

She snorted, bitter. “A bit late for that, isn’t it?”

“I don’t see why.”

“Late, I thought that was the point.”

“Of what?”

“All this.”

Skelton sighed and turned away, but now she wasn’t prepared to let him go.

“This welcoming committee,” she sneered. “The long-suffering looks. The way you’re being so bloody careful not to ask me if I know what time it is.”

He didn’t know what to do with her hostility: smother it, deflect it; impossible to ignore it There were silver rings in both her ears and even in the subdued suburban lighting they shone. What use was anger when every thought he had of her was something other than that? Sentimental, that’s what Kate would call him: sentimental old fool.

“I’m going to have some coffee anyway,” he said.

He was sitting on a stool, elbows on the fitted surface, cup held between both hands, when she came into the kitchen. She pulled out one of the other stools, but didn’t sit on it; stood less than easily, instead, examining the floor.

“Sure you don’t want some?”

Kate shook her head.

Skelton wished he didn’t think like a policeman, didn’t think like a father. Silence settled uneasily between them. Kate showed no sign of wanting to move. Shut up, said Skelton to himself, shut up and wait.

“How did you …?” he began.

“I got a lift.”

“Who from?” The question out before he could stop it.

“Nobody I knew.”

He looked at her sharply, not knowing if it were true or if she was saying it to shock him, hurt. Her response as automatic as his.

“I stood in the road and stuck my thumb out. These two blokes pulled over. I don’t know who they were, do I?”

“You could have phoned.”

“Yeah? Where?”

“Here. Phoned me. I would have …”

“Come to meet me, my father the superintendent of police. No thanks.”

“Then you should have left earlier.”

“I couldn’t”

“Got a taxi.”

“What with?”

“Money. You had money.”

“I spent it.”

“Katie.” Skelton turned on the stool, reached out his hands towards her. “Don’t do this?”

“Do what?”

He withdrew his hands as he stood. “Look,” he said, “if you’re going out at night and you think you’re going to be this late back, tell me.”

“And you’ll say, don’t go.”

“I’ll give you the money for a taxi.”

“Every time?”

“Yes, every time.”

“No,” she said.

“Why ever not?”

“Because it’d get spent before it was time to come home.”

She pushed her way past the sliding door and left him to listen to her footsteps, rising up the stairs above his head. In the morning she would come down with all the gel rinsed from her hair, the earrings, all save one, replaced by studs, neat and small. Blouse, jumper and skirt: no makeup. Half a dozen halting words and she would be gone.

Katie.

When the phone rang, the cats stirred before Resnick. He had finally fallen asleep with a pillow jammed over his head, arms and legs stretched diagonally across the bed.