Authors: A. J. Reid
The room was not a room, but a padded cell. Graziano hurled me inside and slammed the heavy door shut. In the dead silence, I gazed at the rolling canvas peaks and valleys of the walls and floor, sullied by the footprints of shoplifters detained for the police. I'd heard about the room from other staff, but I’d thought that
padded cell
was just a nickname for it. I wondered how many of these footprints belonged to staff who had defied Doyle. More than belonged to shoplifters, probably. I passed the time counting up how many spots of blood I could find that hadn't been completely scrubbed out of the grubby canvas material.
An hour later, the door to the room opened.
‘Please don't call the police. They’ll take my daughter.’
As the plain-clothes store detective pushed the man inside, I had to shift to avoid being trampled by his holey trainers.
‘Sit down and shut up,’ the detective growled in a thick Yorkshire accent.
He was about to close the door when he saw me and did a double take. ‘What are
you
doing in here? Hand in the till? Liberties in the stock room?’
‘I ate a sandwich in the stock room. I took nothing,’ I answered.
‘Except an unauthorised break,’ he said. ‘You'll be alright. They'll let you out at closing time.’
‘So I'm being punished?’
‘Reckon you'll do it again?’
‘Ok, thanks a lot,’ I sighed in the direction of his inflated drinker’s face.
‘Not my rules, mate. I'm just trying to make a living,’ the store detective said, heaving out a smoker's laugh and crouching down to meet my stare. ‘You don't know anything, do you?’
‘I know they heard a lot of that at the Nuremberg Trials.’
The store detective shook his head and smiled, breathing last night’s whisky binge all over me. ‘If Dianne Doyle had been in charge of instating the Third Reich, you'd have goose-stepped your way to work this morning.’
With that, he closed the door, leaving me with the shoplifter, who was sat in the corner of the cell.
He had his elbows rested on his knees and his head rested on his forearms in the dead silence. When he spoke, it sounded as if his voice was coming from inside my skull, because there was no ambience in the room. His voice was very soft.
‘Social services gonna take her this time.’
He put fingers and thumbs to his eyes in an attempt to stem the flow of tears. The room was entirely dark except for the rectangle of light provided by the peep hole in the door.
‘Do you have kids?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘You think I'm just another smackhead on the rob.’
‘
Are
you?’ I asked.
‘I haven't always been like this,’ he muttered, while raising his hands in invitation to look at him, to be disgusted by him.
‘No?’
‘I ran a tailor's. It was my father’s,’ he smiled, revealing that no nook or cranny of his body had escaped the ravages of destitution. His mouth looked like a bric-a-brac sale of broken, stained porcelain that would shatter if he tried to eat anything stiffer than a Victoria sponge. ‘I still
am
a tailor,’ he said, smoothing down his talking trainers with his fingerless gloves and brushing off his irretrievably filthy jacket, which was two sizes too big for him.
When Sean’s father died, the tailor’s was only closed for a week, but Doyle wasted no time in opening a men’s fitting department within Menswear. Six months later he’d been forced to sell the shop, unable to meet the rent because Doyle had undercut all his prices, bought the block of shops and raised the rates. It had been eight years since Doyle took over, and before that, things had been very different, according to Sean. He was sad about Mr. Tanner's disappearance not just because they had an understanding between them as businessmen, but also because when Sean was a child, the old man would bring him chocolate at Christmas. Sometimes, he even brought him toys with damaged packaging that couldn't be sold in the store and he was always supplying his father with extra material and haberdashery whenever he could.
Once Sean had been declared bankrupt, his wife left him for another man, leaving him to care for their daughter alone.
‘That's when I found Golden Brown, texture like sun,’ he sang.
‘Why do you do it?’
‘It makes whatever hell you’re in a little smaller, that’s all.’
The footsteps in the corridor were barely audible, yet thundered in my ears. Any hope of a normal life was running away as
they
approached. Sean begged me to help him, not knowing what I stood to lose myself. My guts knotted as the door opened and he was dragged from the cell.
‘What about this one, Ms. Doyle?’
I hid my face from the police in my forearms as blood galloped through my head.
‘We're checking our camera footage to see if he stole anything from the stock room. Leave him ... for now.’
I sensed the glare of the police torch on the top of my head.
‘Aye. Well, let us know if you need us back here.’
‘Thank you, officer,’ Doyle said as she stepped inside and closed the door. Her high heels made no sound as she stalked over to me and stood so close that I could smell her skin through her stockings: clean and fresh in the wake of Sean's stink. I lifted my head to see the outline of her shapely legs and her stilettoes, threatening to puncture the canvas flesh of the cell floor.
‘What are you thinking about, Mr. Black?’ Doyle asked.
I did not answer. Instead, I returned my head to the sanctuary of my forearms. Doyle stood silent, basking in my misery.
‘Where is she?’ I asked.
‘Who?’
My fists clenched as Doyle played with me like a cat pawing at its half-gutted prey.
‘I might remind you that Graziano is watching everything on one of his monitors. I suggest that you remain calm,’ she said, running her hand through my hair.
‘Are you in love?’
Silence.
‘I was in love once, but I couldn’t make him love me back,’ she said, raking her fingernails across the canvas pads covering the walls.
‘Imagine an endless summer so hot that you think you're going to burst into flames.’
‘Not a British summer, then,’ I mumbled into my arms.
‘No, not a British summer,’ she said quietly, still staring out of the little white rectangle and tapping her nails on the Perspex. ‘I had to send him away.’
‘Sent who away? Actually, I don't want to know.’
‘You need to know, Mr. Black. Of all people,
you
need to know that if I don't get what I want, bad things happen,’ she said.
‘I know that if you
do
get what you want, bad things happen,’ I replied.
Doyle's laughter made me wince in the dead ambience of the cell.
‘That’s exactly what he used to say, before I sent him away.’
‘Maybe he
couldn’t
love you?’
‘Once he missed his deadline, he no longer had a say in the matter, my dear,’ she said, raking her fingers through my hair one last time before swiping her security card and letting herself out of the room.
I pulled my collar up around my face and tapped my pocket to ensure that the Captain's flask was still there. Fifteen minutes after Doyle had left, the store detective let me out and told me not to take any more unauthorised breaks unless I wanted
an authorised break in my arm
. He also told me not to mess with these people and reminded me that he was just trying to earn a living, holding his hands up and shrugging.
As I considered all that Doyle had said to me in the cell, snow began to fall. It was all too feasible that she had been talking about Rachel’s father. Looking up at the streetlight, it seemed as though I was travelling through a starlit artery towards a bright, mysterious destination. I continued walking up the hill, against the wind and snow, the blood thudding through my own vessels.
I took out Rachel’s phone and called her number, but there was no answer. Texting her instead, I told her that we needed to talk.
On the black cab journey to the cottage, I decided to come clean and tell her everything.
When the taxi pulled up on the country, there were no lights on and no vehicles in the driveway of the house. The driver seemed none too pleased that he had navigated all those snow-laden roads in vain, so I passed the full fare and a tip for him to take me to Emma’s penthouse. Glaring at me in the rear view, he turned the cab around and headed back towards town.
The taxi fare still glowed red and angry at me in the dark as we pulled up outside the apartment block. The driver mumbled a seasonal greeting to me before unlocking my door to let me out on to the forecourt.
Entering the flat, I could smell laundry and garlic and outside my door hung washed and ironed shirts. I peeked inside a cardboard box in the lounge to find all my stuff from the squat. Emma must have braved the rat shit, barbed wire and broken glass to fetch my belongings. In the kitchen, the oven glowed and hummed on a low setting. I poured myself a glass of red wine and moved to the sofa, where I found a note stuck to the coffee table:
Gone to work. Your dinner’s in the oven. Lots of love, Emma x
.
I looked out of the balcony's sliding door over the snow-covered docks and the city. Not bad for a hideout. I put the chain on the door and laid a large kitchen knife on the glass of the coffee table next to the note before heading to the oven to find a dish of pasta.
I woke up on the sofa to the sound of the door slamming into the chain. I was relieved to find it was only Emma, coming in from work. I undid the chain and welcomed her inside, though she paid me no attention whatsoever, throwing her bag on the floor and staggering to the couch before collapsing on to it.
‘Nice and warm,’ she purred.
‘You alright?’ I asked, sitting down next to her.
‘I'm fine. Nice and warm,’ she slurred and purred.
I lifted her chin and looked in her eyes, which were black and vacant.
‘What have you taken?’ I asked, watching her tongue chase around her lips.
‘Oh, just a little something for the pain,’ she smiled.
I rolled up her sleeve to check her arms and found tiny bruises in the crease of her left.
‘Who gave it to you?’
‘A customer,’ she mumbled, falling asleep. ‘Dianne.’
‘Where is she now?’ I asked, lacing up my brogues and picking up my coat.
‘No. Please,’ Emma said, struggling to reach out her hand towards me. She found my cheek and stroked it, then hugged me as tightly as her opiate-soaked limbs would allow.
‘Thank you.’
The snow was settling on the roofs of the houses, the cranes of the docks, the pavements of the deserted streets. I could see our reflection in the balcony's sliding door superimposed on to the red-lit circuit board of the city. We were something less romantic and more desperate than lovers, clinging to each other in this haven. We were
survivors
.
‘Hello?’ Rachel answered the phone as if she’d just woken up.
‘I need to explain a few things,’ I said.
‘So do I,’ she replied.
‘Let's meet up. You've got the day off as well, haven't you?’
‘Meet me at 10 a.m. at Jake's. I need coffee.’
‘Where did you go last night? I called by the cottage, but no-one was in.’
‘I'll tell you later,’ she said, putting the phone down.
Shaky Jake's was something of an institution amongst the natives. It was a greasy spoon café on the outskirts of town, overlooking the broad and violent river. Everyone seemed to have made the pilgrimage to Jake's, climbing the long steep hill to get their bacon sandwich/black pudding/bitter coffee/builder’s tea. The place looked much better from the inside looking out, with its bare brick walls and Mediterranean décor. The exterior of the building had been weathered by the salt from the river carried on fierce winds up the hill, and attacked by kids with spray paint and a preoccupation with genitalia.
I placed Rachel's coffee in front of her and sat down. She didn't meet my eye, instead concentrating on her mocha.
‘Things aren't working out the way I’d planned,’ she said.
I braced myself for the inevitable:
Rejection.
Dismissal.
Severance.
‘I love you.’
My head felt as if someone had just poured ice cold fizzy water into it and bounced it off a wall. ‘You ...’
‘I love you. That ok with you?’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ I answered, struggling to find the right words.
Rachel shrugged and beckoned for my hand across the table. ‘Well, you don't seem horrified by the idea, so ...’ she said.
‘There's something else.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I know Doyle was responsible for my father's disappearance. That’s why I came to the store: to find out what happened to him.’
‘What do you know?’
Rachel handed me a piece of paper which I unfolded carefully. It was a letter addressed to her father.
David,
You told me today that we couldn’t be together because you could never leave your family.
If you don’t use the enclosed plane ticket tonight, tomorrow morning, police officers will search your house and find evidence of something that will ensure that you never see your wife and daughter again.
You will always be in my heart, David, and for that reason I wish you a safe and speedy journey. I hope that one day we'll meet again under different circumstances.
D
Rachel’s emerald eyes were fixed on the chequered, plastic table cover.
‘Rachel, why didn't you …’
‘I received it a month ago. It’s the first I’ve heard from him since he disappeared,’ she said, turning her eyes from the table to me.
‘I can't do it alone. I have to find him.’
‘Don't you think your mother ...’
‘I don’t want my mother to know,’ she said.
‘I still hear her sitting in her bedroom crying at night and getting up before sunrise to hide her empty wine bottles.’
‘Of course I’ll help you.’
She hugged me, knocking the salt off the table. Once she'd calmed down and we'd gathered up our stuff to leave, I made sure to take a pinch of the salt lying on the floor and throw it over my shoulder. A large trucker received a thorough dusting on his shaven, tattooed head, with some of the salt settling in the hairy folds on his huge neck. He stood up and towered over me, at which point I apologised and explained that we had just received some bad news. All I could think of was how much his head looked like an egg. Rachel apologised, while I offered to pay for the trucker's breakfast by holding out a tenner, which he snatched out of my hand. Two kids on a nearby table began throwing salt at each other, much to the chagrin of their mother. I said sorry to the diners and the staff for the disturbance, and left amid the surprisingly harsh reprimands of an old lady who hit me with her cane on the way out.