Touch (3 page)

 
Annik stood up slowly and drew Serge into a chair. She brought another candle and set it into the candlestick, lighting it with a silver cigarette lighter. The amber necklace glowed against her skin. The top button of her dress was still undone and Serge could see where her breasts began and smoothly divided. The candlelight showed the lines around her mouth, the violet circles under her eyes. She still wore the scarlet slashes of lipstick on her face and neck. But she had forgotten them. They had happened long ago.

Annik brought two plates and put the cake on the table. She took a knife and stood it up in the middle of the almonds. The weight of her arms pushed the blade down through their smile. The cake still held a faint warmth, like body heat. Annik put a slice down in front of him. She tilted her head, whispering.

‘Don't worry, Serge. We're going to eat it all up. All of it.'

I fluffed a gear change taking the last bend into the village and had to brake pretty hard. There were star-shaped yellow flowers under the hedgerows and little stands of snowdrops. The kind my mother used to love. Earlier on we'd seen a rabbit or a hare crossing the road then leaping the ditch. It looked as if it was heading straight back to bed. Rabbit or hare? We couldn't decide. The tyres skidded a little but held. I heard Carol gasp as if she'd suddenly woken up. She reached for the handle above the passenger door and held it as I pulled into the car park. Milking it. You'd think I'd just missed a multiple pile-up. Anyway, I didn't say anything. I just got out and pushed some pound coins into the parking meter.

I opened the driver's door to stick the ticket to the window. Then I put my head back into the car. I could smell Carol's perfume. Jasmine. I kept meaning to tell her that I'd never really liked it. In fact it made me want to throw up. Especially after a few beers. Not an easy thing to say, that. Not to Carol.

‘You can see the house from here. Look.'

‘Where? Oh, ok.'

She stared up at the grey semi with its red tile roof. It squatted on the hillside where the road climbed out of the village on the other side of the river. Taking a look was all my idea, so she sounded less than delighted. Carol pushed the car door open, put a leg out and shuddered.

‘It looks grim.'

‘It's a grim day. Couldn't be worse, really.'

Carol clutched her coat tighter around her. She was five months pregnant and it was starting to show.

‘I know it's a long shot.'

‘Yeah, yeah, they're all long shots…'

I helped her out of the car. We'd driven out from the town and over the moors to get to the village. As a kid I'd been able to look out from my bedroom window to where the hills rose up beyond the rubber factory and weaving sheds and the new housing estate and the scrubland behind the house with its stinking brook. Some days they looked close enough to touch. Today they'd been hidden in mist and we'd driven down through skeins of cloud. Thirty-five minutes, so it was do-able. I could still get to work.

We'd met at the hospital. Carol was the ward clerk in orthopaedics and I was in radiography: secure, low-paid jobs, since illness never went out of style. Carol still had a few months to go before her maternity leave. We'd not planned much beyond that. Beyond that was still very hard to imagine.

 
The car park smelled of soot and the trees were bare. Some of them cradled the silhouettes of old birds' nests: crows or rooks. They broke from the branches, calling out with rasping cries. The days were starting to lengthen and the birds were taking notice. We had to step over puddles to reach the path. And it was cold, the kind of cold that's worst in April. The sort that grips your chest: wet and rich with consumption. Last week I'd X-rayed a Zimbabwean refugee with TB. His lungs had looked like rotten rags. A hundred years ago it would have been common in sodden little places like this, when they were still scraping peat from the hills to keep warm and working for a pittance on the estate. I looked at my watch.

‘We're early. We've got almost an hour. What about some lunch?'

‘Ok, let's. Where?'

Carol wasn't at her most talkative. We'd both taken some free time from work to look at the house. I guess she might have spent it at home looking through catalogues for baby clothes or maternity wear or something. But here she was dragging through the rain with me on a half-arsed quest for the perfect home.

There was a café next to the car park and a toilet block put there for tourists and weekend visitors. Escapees from tight little north Lancashire towns. It didn't look promising. Carol shrugged and took my arm. I pulled away.

‘Hold on a sec, I need the gents….'

I stood in the smell of stale piss and disinfectant whilst Carol waited in the cold. My pee stung as it dribbled out, a baleful yellow. The taps were broken and I had to lift the lid from a cistern to wash my hands. They were raw with cold when I caught Carol up and led the way to the Jackdaw Café.

Four bikers sat at tables outside with bacon sandwiches and mugs of tea. Their machines were leaning on side-stands behind our car. A Kawasaki and three Hondas. I'd never fancied Jap bikes much, myself. I'd once had an ancient BMW twin that leaked oil for England. Or Bavaria, to be more accurate. Breaking my wrist playing football put paid to that. I'd never got back into it somehow. Sold it to a real arsehole who knocked me down seventy quid. But for a couple of years I was out every Sunday, up on the A65 to Devil's Bridge at Kirkby Lonsdale, standing with a mug of tea and a bacon bap, watching those crazy kids leaping off into the river for a dare. It was a kind of freedom, I guess. But with my scabby old Beemer I'd never fitted in.

The lads nodded to us as we came up to them. The café was tiny with a few tables, a chalked Specials board and a chipped Formica counter. Behind that, the kitchen was hazy with bacon smoke. The proprietor was a fat guy, middle aged with wavy grey hair, a silver earring and a striped apron. He waved at us across a couple of customers queuing for tea.

‘There's room upstairs. Help yourselves.'

I nodded. His fingers were yellow with nicotine, two of them missing from one hand.

‘Thanks. This way?'

He nodded and I guided Carol to the stairs, going up behind her, watching her knuckles whiten and relax as she gripped the rail. I imagined the fat guy losing his fingers in an industrial accident and then setting up the café with the compensation. Lucky bugger. Unless he'd played the violin, that is. It didn't seem likely, mind you; and all luck is relative.

 
The upstairs dining room was little more than a landing. But it was crammed with tables and a coal fire burned in an iron Victorian grate. There was a row of alcoves, each one stuffed with dried flowers. The walls were hung with photographs of ancient country folk, teams of shire horses hitched to ploughs, agricultural labourers lined up in front of a steam-driven threshing machine. Myths from the Golden Age of child mortality: diphtheria, measles, galloping consumption and pox. At the back were the toilets and a tiny kitchen with a dumb waiter. Then a real waitress squeezed her arse between the tables towards us. We ordered parsnip and coriander soup and a roll. There wouldn't be time for much else.

Two elderly couples hunched over their food at separate tables without speaking. I thought of my father after my mother died, riding round the town on his bus pass, eating alone in cafés and chippies and pubs, wondering why his children hardly visited. The way he'd phone up at dawn to ask which day of the week it was. Even now an early morning phone call could crack me from the sheets like a whip. We stared at the river through a square of window. There were black and white birds with long orange beaks whirling over the water. They looked quarrelsome, as if their hormones were raging. I knew a bit about that from Carol. She had two kinds of PMT – pre and post – with maybe a few days respite in the middle. I reached across and took her hand. It felt dry and thin. Her wedding ring was loose against her finger. I wanted to say something reassuring.

‘It's ok. It's only a house. It's not such a big deal.'

‘Only!'

‘Come on, it's a day out. We could be at work.'

I gave her what I thought was a supportive smile, but she thought it was something else and frowned, looking past me.

Then she jogged my arm.

‘Look out!'

I felt something bump into my chair.

‘I'm sorry, he's half asleep!'

The waitress was at my elbow with our home-made soup. It was greasy and thin, bland with a coil of cream like a white turd. It came with a granary roll that tasted of nothing. I bent my head to the spoon. If I complained, Carol would say I was a snob. She didn't have much time for fads. Her idea of cooking was parking a takeaway in the microwave. I did all the fancy stuff in the kitchen. It helped me unwind after work.

By the time we were eating the fire was scorching my back, so that I could smell the hot wool of my jumper. The heat made my scalp itch. It reminded me of having chilblains as a kid in a house with no central heating; the way we clung to the fire and took hot water bottles to bed and burned our feet on them.

Three female cyclists came in, piling their helmets on a chair, sniffing from the cold. They wore tight leotards against their flat bodies. When the waitress presented herself and they ordered their food, I noticed that one of them had an Italian accent overlain with Lancashire vowels. She sounded weirdly cosmopolitan. What was that word Terry used?
Other
. Which was bollocks, because everyone is. But even those hard cases fell silent in that grim little room. A few spots of rain speckled the window. The birds had disappeared downriver. I thought of them fucking in the wet grass, or whatever birds do when they do it. I thought of Carol stroking me to get me hard that last time, then gasping as I went in. Faking it, probably: I wasn't that good. But you wouldn't think it to look at her now. And the old couples must have been like that once, before their skin loosened and crinkled like tissue paper, before whatever it was that had been between them became something else. Companionship. Exasperation. Hatred, even.

One of the old ladies pushed past our table to the toilet, catching her dress on the back of my chair, unhooking it and moving on without a smile. I pushed back the cuff of my jumper and felt a little ball of sweat curl down from my armpit. It was almost time.

 
It was a five-minute walk to the house, if that. We'd down-loaded the details from the estate agent's website and I carried them rolled up into a peashooter. The vendor was showing us around, which, as Carol had already observed, is rarely a good idea. A half-timbered suburban semi – even though it was stone-built, even though it was in a desirable village location – wasn't quite our thing. We just needed a little more space in the house, a spare room for the baby, a garden where it could play out. Maybe space to grow some vegetables. We just needed a bit more of everything. Which you couldn't get.

Predictably my father had died without leaving a will. My brother and I had to go to probate and, eventually, after months of waiting, we'd been able to split the value of the house. The contents were worth nothing and we'd ended up paying for a house clearance. It didn't do to think about what my father would have said to see the furniture and knick-knacks he'd collected with my mother treated as junk. There wasn't much left after paying outstanding bills. Not much to show for his life. But it was something. It was a start. And maybe it could work for us. Terry had banked his and gone back to Kuwait where he taught English to the kids of ex-pats from the US and all over Europe. Cushy, as he often admitted. He was well out of it.

We were keen to move away from the town. Well, to be fair to Carol, I was keen. I'd lived there all my life. She was from Wolverhampton and it never seemed to bother her. She'd have been happy with a new house on one of the estates that made me want to scream.

Here I was, thirty-three, and still shopping in the supermarket where I'd had a holiday job as a teenager. Still seeing lads I'd gone to school with, looking years older than they really were, yelling at their kids in the town centre or trapped against the window in Burger King. Some of them had already got divorced from the teenage girls they'd married. Some had joined the army and came home on leave from wherever and whatever it was they'd learned to kill. You saw them drinking alone in pubs, pulling at a cigarette, staring at the one-armed bandits as they jerked down the lever. They were always glad to see you, glad to bribe you out of a few minutes of your life with a pint. Sometimes you met them jogging down the canal towpath at weekends with their Walkmans and iPods. Occasionally, they turned up in the local papers, injured in a car accident or blown to pieces in Iraq or up in court for kicking somebody's head in over a girl. Maybe all three, but not in that order.

I hated the feeling of belonging. Today offered a chance to put some distance between the past and me. For a house in the country, this one was suspiciously affordable. It wasn't the cottage with beams and a tiled kitchen that I'd hoped for, but on the website the rooms had looked spacious and it boasted long views of the valley. Even a wide-angle lens couldn't fake that. The house faced southwest where it would catch the sun for most of the day. The write-up was ambiguous about the garden and, now we were here, it was definitely close to the road.

We huddled in the little mock-Tudor porch, half turning to the view of slate roofs crouching on the opposite side of the valley. Carol was dabbing on lipstick. Smoke was curling over grey stone houses, crows calling from the copse on the hill behind. There were streaks of white shit down the clay tile roof and the drainpipes were crooked where the fixings were missing. Someone was clearing his throat.

‘Mr and Mrs Peyton? Hi, I'm Martin. Come in, now.'

The ‘now' was meant to be homely. But it sounded false. We shook hands and he brought us inside. He was a man in his thirties, like me. Medium height, thinning hair, a hollow-cheeked, long-nosed face with broken veins purpling his cheeks. His teeth were stained and when he smiled, his face twisted slightly out of true, as if he'd once had Bell's palsy. I knew about that because Carol's mother had suffered from it and it had left her with a drooping eyelid.

Martin walked with a dropped shoulder, a faint lopsidedness. He was wearing a pale blue Reebok tracksuit and tartan bedroom slippers, broken down at the heel. There was a smell in the hallway that leaked through the house. It was the smell you find after a week's holiday when someone turned the freezer off by mistake – a mixture of forgotten fish and stale cat food. I'd done that once and Carol had gone berserk: coming back from a week's camping in France, which she'd hated (surprise, surprise) to that.