Torn (2 page)

The group moved closer. The rumble of dissenting voices grew louder. As if suddenly aware of his vulnerability Sean looked around at the oddball band of individuals. There could be no doubt now whose side they were on. The man in the woolly hat moved closer, reached forward. Sean reared back, shoulder raised as if to strike. But the first man's gesture was placatory.

‘You're not hearing the lady, pal. Why give yourself all this grief? Force never solved anything. It's obvious she doesn't want to go with you.'

Sean let go of her wrist and flailed wildly at the man, knocking his hand away as if disgusted by his touch.

‘What do you know about it?' he roared. ‘It was me who rescued her. Picked her up and stood by her when she was in trouble.'

‘And I'm bloody tired of having to be grateful, Sean,' Jess interrupted. ‘I'm tired of being pressured to go back to work. Tired of being shouted at or slapped whenever you feel frustrated. And I'm tired of you bullying Rory.'

‘Bullying? He needs discipline. You seem determined to turn him into a wimp. Well, don't come running to me, darling, next time your life goes belly up.' He glanced round at the others. ‘I should have realised you'd have found yourself another man … men, by now. Don't think much of your choice. You must be desperate! I'll give it six months before you come running back …'

‘It's not up for negotiation, Sean.'

‘Even if you don't want
me
, you'll never hack it here. You'll never be able to stay away from London. Impossible. You? Keep away from the shops? I'd like to see it.'

‘I no longer want that life.'

‘Then stay with your posse of weirdo friends. See how long you last. And don't worry about harassment. I'm not coming here again. I'm not begging! You're welcome to this fucking half-arsed town! Go to fucking hell, Jessica!' Sean stooped to pick up her coat and flung it towards her contemptuously. It landed on the ground near the young man.

Sean's eyes narrowed. ‘You'd just better be hot stuff in bed, son, if you've a prayer of keeping that bitch interested,' he said, before slouching bullishly up the road, stopping just once to glare at the people clustered protectively around her.

Chapter Two

Since Friday evening Jess' shocked outrage had diluted a little, but now was queasily mixed with the less explicable emotion, shame – as if she did indeed bear some responsibility for the incident. At the very least she could have accompanied her friend, when Sheila had received the summons on her mobile phone about the burglar alarm. But oh no! She'd had to stay on for just one more drink hadn't she? It was doubtful that Sean would have had the balls to try to assault her if there'd been two of them leaving together. Nor could she shrug off the uncomfortable sense of guilt and embarrassment at the way the intervention by the young man and his friends had concluded.

‘Who was he?'

‘What?' Jessica glanced up. She'd not noticed Sheila's return from organising the nursery children at the various tables.

‘Your knight in shining armour?' Sheila explained. Jess half smiled, almost able to hear the ironic quotation marks around the cliché.

‘Oh … he was one of that band of new-agers sitting behind us.'

Sheila nodded. ‘I know the crowd you mean. Mainly ex-students, art or music college I guess, and all probably on the dole. They hang around the whole food café during the day and the Prince Rupert at night. Even seen one or two of them begging.'

‘Begging! I thought by leaving London I'd be getting away from all that.'

‘Poverty doesn't stop at the M25. And I really mean busking, though it comes to the same thing. Playing a penny whistle or … there's a marvellous juggler amongst them, hat on the ground, a few coins in it. So, which one was he?'

‘Wispy beard and dreadlocks.'

Though the group concerned didn't go out of their way to blend in, they had in fact been more sober in demeanour than many of the pub's clientele. For much of the evening they'd talked quietly, heads bent over newspapers and documents. Unsurprising that Jess could only distinguish them by their hair. From where she was sitting their hair was the most conspicuous aspect of their appearance. Many wore it long, the women's either plaited or tied into ribboned braids, the men's loose, if similarly abundant. There'd been one with a tight ski-type hat pulled down, greasy jelly-fish strings of hair hanging below it, and one of the heads was shaved and his scalp elaborately tattooed. And then there'd been the individual with the fuzzy fawn dreadlocks and a wispy beard.

‘Well, I think he was the one with dreadlocks,' Jessica amended.

‘You think? Not hard to spot. It wasn't
that
dark outside the pub.'

‘But it's not like I spent the evening studying them. Anyway, by the time he'd come outside he'd pulled on one of those woolly hats with ear-flaps, like a Bolivian Indian. His head looked swollen and lumpy.'

The young man in the stretched knitted hat had stooped to pick up Jessica's coat from where Sean had flung it. ‘What a wanker,' he remarked, conversationally. ‘Are you all right? You're really white. Did he hurt you?'

Suddenly incapable of speech, Jessica shook her head. Fear and fury had fuelled her resistance. As the adrenaline drained away, shock was sucked into the vacuum, turning her limbs to jelly, leaking the sour fumes of nausea into the back of her throat. She accepted the coat wordlessly and sat abruptly on the rim of the stone drinking trough, subliminally aware of the protesting throb echoing up her spine from her bruised coccyx. Stooped and rocking slightly, her hair straggled forward, veiling her face. Through waves of shivers she managed to utter, ‘I'm sorry.'

‘There's nothing for you to feel sorry about.'

‘What he said … about good in bed …'

‘Forget it. He's talking rubbish.'

‘What's her name?' a female voice asked. ‘After a shock like that she ought to come inside, sit down for a bit, have something to drink.'

‘Jess. I'll be …' Her head was still bent, unseeing eyes directed to the bundled coat embraced in her lap. ‘I'll be OK. I've got to get home, pick up my little boy.' The energy summoned to form the words dwindled.

‘Is there anyone who could come with you, Jess?' the first man asked gently, taking the coat from her unresisting hands and draping it round her shoulders. ‘The woman you were sitting with in the pub?'

‘Sheila?' Surprised he'd even noticed her, let alone her companion, Jessica lifted her head and pushed back her hair. Even that slight rearrangement ignited a protesting fiery buzz across her scalp.

‘Her burglar alarm … she had to …' From barely being able to speak a few moments before, a scarcely coherent gabble had erupted from her mouth. ‘… had to check. Look … so kind of … I … I … I'm sure I'll be … Thank you … Don't know what …' Before his intervention he was just one of the amorphous band she'd lumped together dismissively as ‘new-age' types. She could see little of his face, pallid under the street-lights but supposed he must be the individual from the pub singled out by his Rastafarian locks. The patterns of his knitted hat were stretched and distorted over his enlarged head; on the crown a sprout of wool stood comically upright like an apple stalk. A droopy beard and moustache obscured mouth and chin. The hat's tasselled earflaps hung over his cheeks.

They were all eccentrically dressed in multi layers of ‘ethnic' clothing – jackets over cardigans over waistcoats over shirts, the girls in droopy skirts and concertina leggings, the men in baggy trousers and untied, sagging boots. Though the man in the knitted Bolivian Indian hat still regarded her with concern, most of the group were now talking amongst themselves; one hit a rolled up document into his palm.

‘… And don't forget that a new road will need tons of hard core and gravel, which they'll bring in from the cheapest, i.e. nearest, source. As soon as the road's agreed, whichever route's chosen, don't think our “Lord of the manor” will be slow to bang in an application to extract gravel from his land. Or worse. I'll take bets on it.'

Jessica had seen something about plans for a by-pass in the local paper and read of a growing protest movement. But she'd so recently arrived that the locations of fields, farms, and copses of trees mentioned in the protest letters meant nothing to her. She didn't know these places, had already forgotten the names, and anyway, had no spare emotion to care. If asked her view, she would probably have said that Warford High Street was so polluted by the noise and fumes of heavy container lorries trundling through its centre that a by-pass would be good for the town and its inhabitants. Still, people had a right to their opinion. And the fact that someone from the ‘alternative' end of town had stood up for her endeared him, and therefore his friends, to her. They all look fairly impoverished, and she fumbled in her bag.

‘I can't thank you enough. But I've got to get home, to my son. Please, buy yourself a drink or …' The young man looked at the note she held out with an expression bordering on disdain.

‘Keep your money. I'd've done the same for anyone. People behaving like that just piss me off.' There was a murmur of support from those around him. Not only had she insulted him by her clumsy attempt to show gratitude in some material way, she'd put herself firmly in the camp of the bourgeois middle-class who thought everything could be solved with money.

‘You coming, Planks?' someone said to the man in the comical knitted hat, and they all began to move off.

‘Why do the young want to look like clowns these days?' Sheila now commented. ‘I didn't pay them much attention on Friday, I had my back to them, but I
have
seen a lad in town once or twice, straggly blonde beard, mousy dreadlocks that stick out in every direction … like an explosion in a rope factory.'

‘Yes,' Jess laughed half-heartedly, still bothered by her crass offer of money. ‘Sounds like the same character.'

‘He's been with a girl, red hair done in braids, stripy leggings, and rings in her nose.'

Jessica raised her hand defensively to her own nose.

‘Not pretty and tasteful like your stud,' Sheila amended quickly. ‘There are noses and
noses
. Yours is small and fine boned, like the rest of you. Your stud adorns an already good-looking face. Did you get your rescuer's name?'

‘No. I was so shaken all I wanted to do was rush home to cuddle Rory. But of course he was fast asleep when I picked him up from next door.' She had carried him home and tucked him up in bed. Then, for the first time since leaving Sean and London, Jess broke down and wept. Ironic that the incident that had at last released all that pent up emotion came only after she'd begun to feel secure in her little rented house.

Still feeling a complete newcomer to the place she hadn't even known where the Prince Rupert was when Sheila had first suggested the evening out, but it had been easy to find; set back from the High Street in the old part of town. And as she'd left the premises later she recalled thinking that, even without snow, it was a scene far more evocative of the traditional images of Christmas than the commercial glitz of London's West End. Easy to imagine crinolined ladies, carollers with lanterns, and the arrival of the post coach, its caped driver pulling up his team of horses beside the ancient drinking trough. Then suddenly …

‘I really believed I was safe.' Her voice thickened, her eyes blurred. ‘I'd convinced myself all that was behind me. I'm so stupid.' She impatiently wiped the back of her wrist across her eyes. Her voice wobbled. ‘But … it was so bloody humiliating to be dragged along by my hair!'

‘So the first thing you did on Saturday morning was to make an appointment at the hairdressers,' Sheila said brightly, as if to lighten the tone. ‘Don't you feel it's a profound psychological statement to have long hair cut short? Like a transition from femininity to feminism?'

‘No!' Jess half laughed. ‘Sean liked it long. And I just never want to be that vulnerable again.'

‘Exactly. It's a statement of independence … of empowerment, even if only on a subconscious level.'

‘Whatever. Though if it's subconscious how can I know?'

‘And with it you've turned a tragedy into a triumph.'

‘Don't you think it's too short?'

‘No way. You've a classic-shaped skull. Yes, it's radical, but it's stunning. The style really suits you … like a dense, dark velvet against your fair skin.'

‘I'm just about getting used to it now, but when Rory first saw me he was utterly distraught. Then he was bolshie for the rest of the day.'

‘He was punishing you.'

‘Funny aren't they, little kids? Us leaving home and leaving Sean, hasn't been without its up and downs. You know about the broken nights and behavioural problems. But there have been no out and out tantrums. Then I have my hair cut and he has hysterics!'

‘I guess it's a kind of sublimation. He can't express his feelings about losing Sean, but you …? By changing your appearance he's experienced another loss. He's lost the person he's become used to. But at the same time, he knows you're still Mum and feels safe to express his distress to you.'

‘I should have realised, should have tried to prepare him. Thanks for confirming my worst fears. I obviously am a bad mother.'

‘The problem with becoming a first-time parent is that you get no rehearsals. It's the same for everyone. Sink or swim. You're a swimmer. Don't feel guilty for not being perfect. No one is. Talking about hair, make sure you check Rory's regularly. We've a bit of a plague of head-lice at the moment.'

‘Yuk! Thanks! Just what I wanted to hear!' Raised cries interrupted the conversation. Pounding feet, then small hands dragged at the hand of the nursery leader.