Hold My Hand (10 page)

Chapter Sixteen

The car alarm goes off and she knows he’s back. It’s taken months for her to realise that there’s a correlation between the alarm going off and Kieran’s visitations, but of course there is. That bloody idiot in the ground floor flat must leave the door open when he goes down to switch it off, and then Kieran must use the opportunity to sneak in and hide in the shadows in the hall.

Shit, she thinks. I knew it would come down to me in the end. I told her I didn’t mind, but I do. He’s going to be really, really angry and I’m going to have to deal with it.

The guy downstairs always takes five minutes to come down and sort his alarm out. Carol has a faint suspicion that it might be deliberate, that he wants his neighbours to know exactly who owns the Audi parked in the street, but it’s more likely, she supposes, that he sleeps in the nude and he’s lazy. She’s seen him a couple of times, trying to turn the alarm off with the remote control in his key fob, though doing so has only ever unlocked and locked the doors in the hundred or so times he’s woken up the street with his show-off security. She needs to flush Kieran out before he jogs down the steps, Calvin Kleins and black satin robe covering his fake-tan gym skin, and leaves the door hanging open while he does it. It’s hard to credit that he wouldn’t have noticed his former neighbour lurking when he came in, but he never has. Can’t see beyond his own self-interest, that one.

She goes to the window, throws back the curtains.

Someone ducks down into the dark spot formed by the wheelie bins and the hedge. So that’s how he does it. Of course.

She slides the window up. Leans out.

“Kieran?” she shouts.

No voice in response, but she feels a freezing in the dark place behind the bin. He is there: I know he is. And he’s heard me, but somehow he thinks that if he stays still enough I won’t know he’s there.

“Kieran?” she shouts again. “I know you’re down there.”

Still no reply.

“Get the fuck away from here, Kieran,” shouts Carol. “She’s not here.”

Now there’s a definite stir behind the bins. He heard that all right.

The front door opens and her downstairs neighbour appears on the step. Looks up at the sound of her voice and sees her leaning out of the window. Folds his arms, stares up. Carol struggles to remember his name. He has never, after all, introduced himself to her or to any of his neighbours. All she has to go by is the sheaves of junk mail – credit card offers, loan offers, brochures for expensive holidays – that pile up on the front doormat.

“Nick,” she says, “shut the door behind you.”

He looks a bit surprised that she has called him by name. Goggles at her like a blowfish, starts down the steps.

“Seriously,” says Carol, “close the door. You may not realise, but there’s someone in behind the wheelie bins.”

He jumps. He actually left his skin for a second there, she thinks. If there’s one thing a yuppie is more scared of than car thieves, it’s muggers.

“Shit,” says Carol. “Come out from there, will you?”

Kieran stands up, steps out.

Nick bolts up the steps. Stands half-in and half-out of the door, wrapped around it like a small child in desperate need of the lavatory. They both look at Kieran. Carol suppresses an urge to laugh. He looks absurd tonight. He’s always suffered from man-of-action fantasies – action that never got further than a spell in the TA – and tonight he has dressed for it. He is wearing black. Black jumper, black jeans, black shoes and – she almost shouts with laughter when she sees this – a black beanie hat covering his black hair. My God, she thinks: all he need now is a few stripes of mud on his cheeks and he’d do as an extra in a Ross Kemp show.

“Fuck off, Kieran,” she says.

Kieran walks forward, stands on the path, arms crossed defensively across his body. “Don’t tell me to fuck off,” he says.

“Fuck off,” she repeats.

“I just want to see my little girl,” says Kieran.

“Not at one o’clock in the morning you don’t,” says Carol.

The car alarm is still shrieking. Nick appears to be at a loss as to what to do. He glances at the car, glances at Carol, glances at Kieran standing between him and the street, stays rooted to the spot.

“You don’t know anything about it,” says Kieran.

“Yes I do,” says Carol, “believe me, I do. You’ve got a restraining order out on you, Kieran, and you just won’t pay attention to it, will you? You’ve only got yourself to blame.”

“I just,” repeats Kieran, “want to see my fucking kid.”

“Well you can’t,” she says. “She doesn't want to see you. And anyway, she’s not here. Neither of them are.”

She knows that she’s being harsh, but she is so angry – with him, with the situation, with his pigheaded thuggery, the way he thinks his wife and child are his belongings to do with as he will, with the fact that she’s been left to break the news because Bridget is too afraid of his reaction to do it herself – and she can’t help it: she feels like he’s getting everything he deserves. Everything. No, not even half of everything.

“They’ve gone away,” she finishes, spitefully. “Gone to get away from
you
.”

For a moment, the only sound is the shriek of the alarm. Then: “What do you mean?” he asks, and his voice has suddenly dropped. No longer the wheedling, no longer the mistreated Daddy. Both she and Nick hear the edge of threat in his voice.

“Gone away,” she repeats. “Moved away. Moved out. Handed the keys back and buggered off.”

“What do you mean?”

“You heard me,” she shouts. “Now piss off and leave us all in peace.”

I’m not handling this well, she thinks. It’s one in the morning and I’m knackered, and I’m probably making things worse. But fuck it. Since when did Kieran deserve the softly-softly approach?

A window goes up next door. A voice, heavy with sleep, bellows: “shut the fuck up, all of you! Do you know what time it is? There are people trying to sleep here!”

“Sorry,” Carol shouts back, “this won’t take long.”

“What do you mean, won’t take long?” Another voice, a woman's, emboldened by her neighbour’s intervention, drifts down from the attic window two doors up.

“What do you mean, won’t take long?” asks Kieran.

“Shut up! All of you! Go to sleep!” bellows the first voice.

“And turn that faahking car alarm off!”

“And you can fuck off and all,” shouts Kieran. Starts toward the door.

Nick, seeing him approach, darts back inside the hall, slams it shut in his face. Carol, now that there’s a barrier between herself and the street, goes to her own front door, comes out onto the stairs. Nick’s physical presences emboldens her. He may be a useless bugger, but now he’s here there’s no way he can wriggle out of being involved.

The banging starts. Kieran hammering on the front door. Nick leans against it, eyes bulging, sweat on his Youth Serumed forehead. He looks more scared than I feel, thinks Carol.

“Call the police,” he stutters. “For God’s sake, call the police. He’s trying to get in!”

Great, she thinks. There were a few times when we would have been grateful if you’d done that yourself. Nonetheless, she sets off down the stairs as the hammering goes up a notch, the sound of kicking adding to it. Kieran’s rage is mounting. She steps past Nick, puts a finger on the intercom button. Should’ve got those mortise locks, she thinks. Should have got that burglar chain.

“Go away, Kieran,” she says again. “They’re not here anymore. They’ve gone away. There’s nothing here for you anymore.”

A renewed bombardment shakes the door. Kieran’s voice, all control gone, now, howls like a wolf through the wood. “Let me in! Let me in! I wanna see my kid! Let me in, you bitch!”

The hall light timer switch goes off. Even in the dark, she sees the whites of Nick’s eyes. He’s going to have handled this totally differently by tomorrow morning, she thinks. By the time he’s in the office, he’ll have seen Kieran off single-handed.

“Let me in!” bellows Kieran. “Let me fucking in!”

And further away, off on Streatham High Road, the sound of an approaching siren.

Chapter Seventeen

She’s locked back in the old dream. The reliving. Night after night, over and over, like a video image stuck on loop: his teeth bared, the fist drawn back, the crunch of contact, the red. Over and over. His vulpine face looming at her out of the dark, rushing at her, pouncing…

She thinks she might have screamed. Something has woken her. And then she remembers.

He was here, she thinks. He was here. I heard him hammering on the door, shouting to be let in. But now there’s nothing but the wind. And the sweat on the bed-sheets. And the darkness. Velvet, enveloping darkness. The sort of darkness she imagines the blind see. She can make out nothing in her bedroom: no streetlight filters round the curtains, no red alarm clock LED creates its own tiny oasis of normality. No sounds: just the sobbing of the gale and the sound of her own breathing.

He’s here. He’s here.

She reaches into the darkness to turn on the light, clutches only air. Feels the panic grip once again at her throat.
It’s gone. It’s gone. The world has gone while I was asleep…

And then she remembers. You’re not in Streatham any more. You’re in Cornwall. The light is on the other side of the bed.

She reaches out again, to the left this time, finds the familiar shape of her bedside lamp and presses the button. Breathes again. Collapses against the pillows.

Suddenly, the room, which felt cavernous as Hades when she couldn't see its boundaries, closes back in again, becomes comforting. She likes this room already. With its tongue-and-groove panelling the sound of the wind tossing the foliage outside, she feels as though she is on a boat, way out to sea, safely distant from London, from Kieran, from fear. This will be our haven. I know it. This will be our sanctuary.

Bridget begins to relax against the pillows. He cannot find us. We are safe and he can only find me in my dreams, and I am awake and we are safe again.

She picks up her watch from where it lies on the bedside cabinet – the clock is still buried somewhere, at the bottom of one of the bin liners in the living room – and checks the time. 1.30am. Here I am again, awake, in the small hours. How long will it be before I learn to sleep again? When will I go to bed and close my eyes and stay here, resting, without one ear open for invasion? I’ve got out of the habit. So many nights spent waiting for the bang of the door, the thunder of fists, the bay of his voice.

It’ll take time, Bridget. It’ll be a long, long time before you sleep the whole night through.

There’s a packet of valerian tea by the kettle, bought in the health food shop in Wadebridge under the advice of a girl who looked as though she was barely old enough to be reading let alone prescribing to strangers. She throws the covers back, gets out of bed and pads through to the kitchen.

The wind is very strong tonight. It hadn’t occurred to her that warm, friendly Cornwall, the destination that tens of thousands of British people dream of for its Riviera delights, could be so inhospitable in the Winter. But of course it is, locked between the Bristol Channel and the wild west-English one: on the edge of a wasteland famous for treachery and exposure deaths. These rocky shores have always provided a rich shipwreck harvest. Only an untamed part of the country could have gone on for so long, cutting the throats of floundering sailors and plundering their cast-up cargo to supplement their scratch-farm existence. When she was a kid – before reading became uncool, before the deaths of her parents threw her prematurely into a world of adult cares, before Kieran – she used to devour the books of Daphne de Maurier, swallow with relish those tales of distance and derring-do. Funny, really, that she has only just noticed that she is living in the place where many of those tales were set. They even passed signs for Jamaica Inn on the way down here.

She fills the kettle, presses the tit and sits at the kitchen table to wait for it to boil. Sitting there, she realises that she is actually, for the first time since the plan to come down here was put into action, hungry. Genuinely hungry. Not just knowing-she-needs-to-feed-herself-to-keep-going hungry, but hungry with a relish and a longing so intense that she barely remembers the last time she felt a feeling so strong.

Poached eggs on toast, that's what she wants. Her mouth waters at the thought of runny yolks exploding into a warm pool of butter and marmite, the farinaceous comfort of heavy wholemeal bread fresh from the toaster. Extraordinary how the simplest of pleasures can have such intense sensuality at their very core. She goes to the fridge, gets a couple of slices of toast from the bag and pops them under the grill.

The wind raises its voice, blats against the window like a passing express train. Involuntarily, though the room is warm and she is well wrapped up, she shivers. Then she smiles. Gosh, this is nice. I can't remember when… oh, Yasmin, this will be good. It will be a happy time. Our first good winter: we can do all those British Winter things: toasting crumpets in front of an open fire; snowballing; running through the rain in hats with ear flaps, wind-chapped cheeks and eyes bright with the cold. This is so right. It’s so right…

The kettle clicks off. She stands once again, starts her tea off brewing and fills a pan with boiling water ready for the eggs.

It can all be this simple, she thinks. Here, in our haven: we just do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay and enjoy the pleasure of the simple life.

It is wonderful. Almost heavenly. How did I go this long without realising that a poached egg was proof that there really is a God? The eggs, free range, have yolks bigger and more golden than any she can remember seeing in London. They burst under her knife, trickle in peppered golden perfection across the toast, soak in. Bridget takes a sip of her tea, cuts a corner off, spreads it with yolk and pops it into her mouth. Closes her eyes and suppresses a surprising moan of pleasure. She feels as though she is beginning to wake from a long, long slumber. Suddenly she is noticing things around her – food, colours, heat and cold – against which she feels she had been anaesthetised, possibly forever.

There is a proverb – Spanish, she thinks – that goes “a life lived in fear is a life half lived”, and she thinks she is beginning to understand the full truth of it. Life with Kieran – the trepidation, the walking on eggshells, the care with words and looks and actions, even with thoughts, lest her expression should betray them – was a life lived in black and white and shades of grey. She never dared to taste the colours, see the heat, feel the music.

I never had a second to myself, even when he wasn’t there, she thinks. It would have been unthinkable, sitting down like this by myself, enjoying this simple moment, when I knew he might walk back through the door at any time, find me idle, be angry. It was survival, she thinks: it wasn’t life. She cuts off another slice of egg-soaked bread, closes her eyes and savours its salty, fatty goodness.

“I can’t sleep.”

Bridget opens her eyes. Yasmin – pink woolly pyjamas and bare feet, manky old monkey clutched against her chest – stands in the doorway, tousled hair and big brown eyes.

“I’m sorry, baby. Did I wake you up?”

Yasmin rubs a tired fist across the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know,” she states. “I think I’ve been awake forever. What are you eating?”

“Eggs. Do you want some?”

“
Eeugh
,” says Yasmin, “eggs.” She pulls a face that involves a lot of tongue. “No
thank
you.”

“Not eeugh,” she says. “Eggs are lovely. Especially with soldiers.”

“Yukky,” says Yasmin, unequivocally. Yesterday she ate three bowls of home-made custard without a murmur of disapprobation. The mysteries of children’s ever-changing appetites with always be unfathomable.

“I’ve nearly finished,” says Bridget, “then I’ll take you back to bed.”

“Don’t want to,” says Yasmin.

“Yes, but,” says Bridget, “it’s bedtime. Well after, actually.”

“Can’t I come in with you?”

“No, honey. You’ve got your own bedroom now. That’s where you sleep.”

“Yes, but,” says Yasmin.

“No, but,” says Bridget. “You’re a big girl now. Surely you want to sleep in your own room? Only babies want to sleep in with the grownups.”

Yasmin looks torn. Appealing to her sense of her own maturity always works. Up to a point. He pleasure in having a space all of her own is obviously fighting a big battle with the memory of all those fuggy nights in with her mother. Bridget knew it would be an issue, parting company like this. She’s been surprised she’s got away with it for six nights already.

Yasmin frowns. “Yes, but if I can’t sleep then I’ll be tired in the morning and you won’t like that,” she threatens.

Bridget scoops the last of her midnight feast into her mouth, does a couple of chews and washes it down with the dregs of the tea. Time to be decisive. If I hang around discussing it with her, she’ll think there's room for manoeuvre. “Yes,” she says, holds out her hand, “and you know we’ve got the first lot of guests coming tomorrow. Which means we’ve both got to be on good form. Come on. I’ll take you back.”

And suddenly, there are tears in her daughter’s eyes. “Mummy,
please
! Please? Can’t I come in and sleep with you? Just for tonight?”

“Honey, “ says Bridget, “if we do just tonight, then it’ll be just tomorrow night and then just the night after as well. Come on. Be grown up. Do you know how many people
long
for a bedroom  all to themselves?”

“But its not! It's not!”

“Not what?”

“Not all to –” she pauses, looks a bit confused by what she’s been about to say, changes tack. “I just can’t sleep tonight! Please, Mummy! I’ve not been – I’ve not been in with you since we got here, have I?”

Bridget has to acknowledge that this is true. Sort of. Yasmin has always waited, at least, until she herself was sound asleep before creeping in with her under the covers. “So what’s so different about tonight?”

“I don’t know,” says Yasmin reluctantly, “I just can’t – I feel like there’s–”

“It’s just the wind. It’s nothing. It’s just a bit blowy out there tonight.”

They reach the bedroom door. Yasmin, hand still clutched in Bridget’s, pulls back, hard, attempts to drag her mother back into the corridor. “
Please
, Mummy!”

I’ve got to be firm. We can’t carry on sharing a bed ’til she’s a teenager.

She bends downs and picks her daughter up, hugs her to her side. Yasmin's legs automatically wrap around her hip, pubic bone balancing on the bulge where encroaching age and cheap food have started to expand her flesh. “Please!” she pleads again.

“I’ll tuck you in,” says Bridget.

She turns the light on, notices that both of the beds in the room are unmade. The spare bed, the one on the right, looks as though it’s been tossed apart by a fault-finding sergeant-major in a cadets’ dormitory. Pillows, quilt and bottom sheet lie rucked up against the wall. Bridget sighs. “You
have
been having trouble sleeping. And did you decide which one you want to be yours, in the end?”

Yasmin looks puzzled. “Well –
that
one.”

She points at the one they had originally agreed would be hers, the one under the slope of the eaves. It is piled, as they arranged it, with her soft toys, dolls and books; just a small puddle of body space left in the middle. It certainly
looks
like the sort of a bed a six-year-old would sleep in. “Of course,” she finishes.

“Just trying the other one out for size then, were you, baby?”

Bridget rubs her nose against her daughter’s cheek, inhales the scents of soap and baby shampoo. How I love you, she thinks. How I love you. However much work you are.

“I didn’t –” says Yasmin.

“Well, somebody did.” Bridget laughs. “Who was it? The Invisible Man?”

Her daughter stiffens. “What invisible man?”