Off Minor (12 page)

Divine gripped the white porcelain, willing himself not to throw up a third time. His throat felt as if it had been scraped out with a blunt instrument and his head was a ball that had been punted eighty yards upfield. If ever he got back up from his knees he had to stagger down to the corner shop for a couple of pints of milk and the twenty Bensons whoever it was in his bed had been asking for ever since raising her head from his pillow, mascara and eye shadow smeared right across it. Half-light of day, she looked seventeen, office junior somewhere, the two of them last night, stuck out on the dance floor, one minute jiggling around to some elec-trocrap, the next rubbing up against her to Phil Collins. “You’re not really a copper, are you?” No, darling, I’m Leonardo da-fucking Vinci!

Kevin Naylor had been up since short of seven, ironing his work shirts in the kitchen while he listened to
The Bruno and Liz Breakfast Show
, pair of them flirting like mad over the microphone, likely didn’t say a word to one another once it was over, separate taxis home to Surrey or wherever. He had hoovered all of the upstairs and about half of the down, stupid bag had jammed up and he’d torn it taking it out, no spares under the sink and his attempt at a running repair with Sellotape had ended in disaster and dust at the foot of the stairs he’d had to sweep up with a dustpan and brush.

When finally he phoned, of course it was her mother that answered; he’d thought she wasn’t going to let Debbie come to the phone at all.

“Three-thirty, then?”

At the other end of the phone, it was ominously quiet.

“Debbie?”

He could feel her mother standing there, exaggeratedly mouthing words for Debbie to say.

“You’re still bringing the baby for tea?”

He had gone into Marks and Spencer and bought one of those Battenberg cakes that she liked, chocolate eclairs, a pair of them in a Cellophane-topped box. He’d queued forever at Birds, in a line of old women and older men, to buy sponge mice with eyes and little tails, each in different colored icing, a malt loaf, gingerbread men. In case Debbie didn’t bring any with her, he had got tins of baby food desserts, rhubarb and apple, rice pudding, apple and plum.

Now he grabbed them from the cupboard shelves, the fridge, tore at their wrappings, hurling them into the sink and squashing them against the sides, pummeling them with his fists.

“Bloody hell, Ray-o! What d’you call that?”

Raymond struck the end of his club against the ground and watched as the ball bounced yards past the twisted metal flag and ran down the slope underneath the hedge at the edge of the municipal putting green.

“Thought you’d be better getting it in the hole than that,” his uncle Terry winked.

“Thinks he’s Tony-bloody-Jacklin, that’s his trouble,” Raymond’s father said, dropping his own ball on the spot.

“Stop bloody moaning,” Raymond said. “Took you five shots at the last one and then you had to knock it in with your foot.”

“That’s what the real pros do, you ignorant twat,” his father said.

“How do you know?” said Raymond scornfully.

“Because I’ve watched them.”

“In your dreams.”

“On the telly.”

“My shot,” said Terry, moving forward.

“Only pros you’ve ever watched,” Raymond said, “are the ones up by the Forest. Fiver for a quick gob-job in the back of the car.”

“Hey!” Raymond’s father went for him with his club, but hit his uncle Terry instead.

Raymond threw down his own club and went storming off across the green, hands in pockets, head down, ignoring the shouts of other players lining up their putts.

“Ray-o!” Terry shouted. “Come on back here.”

“Good riddance!” his father said. “Don’t waste your breath.”

Really surprised, Lorraine had been, when Michael had touched her neck and said, what did she think, maybe they could slip up to bed, have a little rest. Surprised, but pleased. She could scarcely remember the last time they’d made love in the afternoon; when first she’d started seeing him, seriously at least, seemed to be all they’d ever done.

“Where you off to now?” Michael had asked, undressed beneath the duvet, eager to get on with it but thinking maybe Lorraine thought she’d need the K-Y jelly, Vaseline.

“Just checking,” Lorraine said, peeking through the drawn curtains, Emily with her dolls spread out all over the rear lawn, the little pushchair and the pram. She could just hear her voice, pretend adult, telling them they should be more careful with their clothes, asking them if they thought money grew on trees.

She walked back from the window slowly, knowing that Michael was touching himself under the covers, watching the movement of her breasts.

Twenty minutes later, sitting on the toilet in the bathroom, hearing Michael whistling as he put back on his clothes, Lorraine said: “Give Emily a shout, there’s a love. Wash her hands before tea.”

Sixteen

Michael, lighting a cigarette, pushing his shirt down into his trousers, thinking, another six or seven hours, the damned weekend’s good as over. Alarm’ll be going and there I’ll be, fighting for car-park space before seeing the same old faces on the train. The ones who nod and climb behind their
Telegraph;
those who want nothing more than to talk about their round of golf, their kids, their car; the four who had the cards shuffled and dealt before leaving the station, bridge at a penny a point.

“Michael!”

Thinking: Sheffield, that’d be better. Chesterfield, even. Easier. Worth dicing with the traffic on the M1 for a chance to get home at a decent hour, get back to living a proper life.

“Michael!”

He rested his foot on the board at the foot of the bed, so as to tie the lace. Lorraine and I weren’t forever rushing off in different directions, if we had a bit more time to relax, going to bed wouldn’t be such a rare event. Thank God, at least when they did it was still pretty good. He tied his other lace. Lorraine, she’d never needed a lot to get her going; certainly not back when they’d started.

“Michael!”

“Hello!”

“You’re not still there, are you?”

“No, I’m on my way.”

Emily’s dolls were scattered here and there on the back lawn. Her pushchair was skewed sideways in the gravel passage that ran between the side of the house and their neighbor’s high creosoted fence. Michael couldn’t see the doll’s pram at first, but then there it was, pitched on to its side near the garage door.

“Emily!”

He hurried fifty yards in either direction, finally back to the houses front and rear gardens—“Emily!”—all the while calling her name.

“Michael, whatever’s the matter?” Lorraine in the doorway, sweater and jeans, pink towel in her hand as she rubbed her damp hair.

“Emily, she’s not here.”

“She’s what?”

“Not bloody here.”

Lorraine stepping out, towel to her side. “She’s got to be.”

“Yes? Then show me where she bloody is.”

They searched the house, top to bottom, every room, bumping into themselves in and out of doorways, on the stairs, faces increasingly pale, drained.

“Look.”

“Where?” Michael swiveling anxiously round.

“No, I mean …”

“I thought you’d seen something.”

Lorraine shook her head, came forward and took his hand and he shook her away. “Just for a minute,” she said, “we ought to sit down.”

“I can’t bloody sit down.”

“We need to think.”

“Out there looking for her, that’s what we need to be doing.”

“You said you’d done that already.”

“And I didn’t bloody find her, did I?”

His eyes were wild and his hands were beginning to shake. He surprised Lorraine by letting her lead him into the kitchen, though when she pulled out a stool and sat down, Michael remained, agitated, on his feet.

“We should make a list,” Lorraine said, “places where she might be.”

“What places, for Christ’s sake?”

“Friends. Megan Patterson, for instance.”

“That’s half a mile away.”

“Not if you take the cut-through before the end of the crescent. She could easily have walked there in the time we were upstairs.”

“Screwing,” Michael said.

“That’s got nothing to do with it.”

“Of course, it’s got something to fucking do with it! If we hadn’t been up there, leaving Emily alone, this wouldn’t have happened.” He was leaning forward, glaring at her. “Would it?”

Lorraine got to her feet.

“Where d’you think you’re going now?”

“To phone Megan’s mother.”

Val Patterson hadn’t seen anything of Emily, not since a few days ago, and besides, Megan was off at her riding lesson, her father had dropped her off there over an hour ago. Why didn’t Lorraine try Julie Neason, didn’t Emily and her Kim go to school together sometimes? Lorraine rang the Neasons’, but there was no answer. The front door slammed and she knew that Michael had gone back out to look for Emily again. While Lorraine was looking in the phone book, fingers sliding awkwardly over the pages, she heard the car being backed out of the garage, driving away.

In the ten minutes that followed, Lorraine spoke to every one of the parents in the area that she knew and with whom Emily had any kind of contact. Clara Fisher’s dad had been driving past half an hour ago and seen Emily pushing her pram across the front lawn. No, he couldn’t be positive about the time, not to the minute, but he was sure it had been Emily.

“Did you notice anybody else?” Lorraine asked. “Anyone close by? Another car?”

“Sorry,” Ben Fisher said. “I didn’t notice a thing. But then, you wouldn’t expect to really. You know as well as I do what it’s like round here Sunday afternoons, quiet as the grave.”

Outside, a car drew up, the door slammed and there was Michael, shoulders slumped forward, distraught. “Well?”

Lorraine looked away.

“I’ve been four times, up and down the crescent,” Michael said. “Checked everywhere between Derby Road and the hospital. Stopped anyone who was around and asked.”

“We should look again,” Lorraine said. “Inside the house. I mean, really search. Cupboards, everywhere. She might have been hiding, a game, got too frightened to come out.”

Michael shook his head. “I don’t think she just went wandering off.”

“That’s what I say, she’s somewhere here …”

“She’s gone off with someone,” Michael said. Even though he was standing close to her now, close in the carpeted square of hall, the telephone table they had bought from Hopewell’s to match the little chest Lorraine’s parents had given them as a wedding present, she could scarcely hear what it was he’d said. Not wanting to hear the words.

“She’s gone off with someone,” Michael said again, taking hold of her arm below the elbow.

Lorraine shook her head emphatically. “She wouldn’t do that.”

“There’s nothing else, is there?”

“But she wouldn’t.”

Michael released her arm. “How can you be so sure?”

“Because we’ve told her, time and time again, both of us. It’s been drummed into her ever since she could walk. Don’t talk to people you don’t know, anyone who comes up to you in the park, in the street. Don’t take anything, no matter how nice it looks. Ice cream. Sweets. Michael, she just wouldn’t do that.”

He reached out his hand towards her face, brushing back a few strands of hair. “Someone’s taken her,” he said.

Lorraine’s stomach hollowed out and a first tightened inside her throat.

Michael reached past her.

“What are you going to do?”

He looked at her, surprised. “Phone the police.”

“But if she’s not been missing for an hour?”

“Lorraine, how long does it take?”

He was dialing the number when she started, a little breathlessly, gabbling her words together, to tell him about Diana.

All the years that Michael and Diana had been married, they had lived on Mapperley Top, a three bedroomed end-terrace, all they had chosen to afford at the time, not wanting to sink everything into the deposit and the mortgage. Two holidays a year that had meant, not having to stint on going out; clubs, that’s where they went in those days, Diana liking to let her hair down, have a bit of a dance. Afterwards a curry at the Maharani, the Chand: sometimes, if they were feeling especially flush, the Laguna.

After the trouble, the divorce, Michael had found his studio flat and Diana had stayed on in the house, a
For Sale
board outside, though not too many people bothered to come looking. Then, when Michael had wanted somewhere with Lorraine, of course, he’d had to insist that Diana leave; if the only way they could get shot of the place was dropping a few thousand, so be it.

Diana had moved outside the city to Kimberley, a small town where once the men had mostly worked in the pits and the women in the hosiery factories, and now they were fortunate to be working anywhere.

Diana’s house was little more than a two-up, two-down, open the front door and you were standing in the middle of the front room, another couple of paces and you were in the back. Michael turned right past the mini-roundabout, left again on to a narrow street running parallel to the main road. Three lads, ten or eleven years old, were chasing their second-rate mountain bikes up and down the curb, practicing wheelies. Michael stood for some moments outside the house, looking up at the lace curtains at all but one of the windows. Back across the street, someone was sharing this week’s Top Twenty with all but the clinically deaf.

Michael walked past the overgrown privet hedge, through the gap where the gate was supposed to be. The bell didn’t appear to be working and there wasn’t a knocker, so he rattled the letter flap instead, hammered the side of a fist against the door.

“She’s gone away,” called a neighbor two houses down, setting her milk bottles on the front step.

“She can’t have.”

“Suit yourself.”

Several doors along there was an arched passageway, leading to the backs of the houses. Michael stepped around the dustbin and peered through the square of kitchen window, what looked like breakfast things stacked alongside the sink, that didn’t prove anything one way or another. He knocked on the back door, leaned his weight against it: bolted and locked.