sweeping machine, squat with spinning wheels, weaves between the parked cars. Shame it can’t pick up the human garbage- strung-out slum kids who want me to fuck them or buy crack from them.
One of the whores is standing on the corner. A car pulls up. She negotiates, throwing her head back and laughing like a horse. A doped horse. Don’t ride her, mate, you don’t know where she’s been.
At a cafe on the corner of Glen Park and Fishponds, I hang my waterproof on a hook beside the door and my hat next to it, along with my orange scarf. The place is warm and smells of boiled milk and toast. I choose a table by the window and take a moment to comb my hair, pressing the metal teeth hard against my scalp as I pull it backward from my crown to the nape of my neck.
The waitress is big-boned and almost pretty, a few years shy of being fat. Her ruffled skirt brushes against my thigh as she passes between the tables. She’s wearing a plaster on her finger.
I take out my notebook and a pencil that is sharp enough to maim. I begin writing. The date comes first. Then a list of things to do.
There is a customer at a table in the corner. A woman. She’s sending text messages on her mobile. If she looks at me I’ll smile back.
She won’t look, I think. Yes, she will. I’ll give her ten seconds. Nine… eight… seven… six… five…
Why am I bothering? Uppity bitch. I could wipe the sneer off her face. I could stain her cheeks with mascara. I could make her question her own name.
I don’t expect every woman to acknowledge me. But if I say hello to them or smile or pass the time of day, they should at least be polite enough to respond in kind.
The woman at the library, the Indian one, with hennaed hands and disappointed eyes, she always smiles. The other librarians are old and tired and treat everyone like book thieves.
The Indian woman has slender legs. She should wear short skirts and make the most of them instead of covering them up. I can only see her ankles when she crosses her legs at her desk. She does it often. I think she knows I’m watching her.
My coffee has arrived. The milk should be hotter. I will not send it back. The waitress with the almost-pretty face would be disappointed. I will tell her next time.
The list is almost finished. There are names down the left-hand column. Contacts. People of interest. I will cross each of them off as I find them.
Leaving coins on the table, I dress in my coat, my hat and my scarf. The waitress doesn’t see me leave. I should have handed her the money. She would have had to look at me then.
I can’t walk quickly with the shopping bags. Rain leaks into my eyes and gurgles in the downpipes. I am here now, at the end of Bourne Lane, outside a gated forecourt, fenced off and topped with barbed wire. It was once a panel-beaters or some sort of workshop with a house attached.
The door has three deadlocks- a Chubb Detector, a five pin Weiser and a Lips 8362C. I start at the bottom, listening to the steel pins retracting in their cylinders.
I step over the morning mail. There are no lights in the hallway. I removed the bulbs. Two floors of the house are empty. Closed off. The radiators are cold. When I signed the lease, the landlord Mr Swingler asked if I had a big family.
‘No.’
‘Why do you need such a big house?’
‘I have big dreams,’ I said.
Mr Swingler is Jewish but looks like a skinhead. He also owns a boarding house in Truro and a block of flats in St Pauls, not far from here. He asked me for references. I didn’t have any.
‘Do you have a job?’
‘Yes.’
‘No drugs. No parties. No orgies.’
He might have said ‘corgis’, I couldn’t understand his accent, but I paid three months rent in advance, which shut him up.
Taking a torch from on top of the fridge, I return to the hall and collect the mail: a gas bill, a pizza menu, and a large white envelope with a school crest in the top left corner.
I take the envelope to the kitchen and leave it sitting on the table while I pack away the shopping and open a can of beer. Then I sit and slide my finger beneath the flap, tearing a ragged line.
The envelope contains a glossy magazine and a letter from the admissions secretary of Oldfield Girls School in Bath.
Dear Mrs Tyler,
In reference to your request for addresses, I’m afraid that we don’t keep on-going records of our past students but there is an Old Girls website. You will need to contact the convenor Diane Gillespie to get a username, pin and password to access the secure section of the site containing the contact details of old girls.
I am enclosing a copy of the school yearbook for 1988 and hope it will bring back some memories.
Good luck with your search.
Yours sincerely,
Belinda Casson
The front page of the yearbook has a photograph of three smiling girls, in uniform, walking through the school gates. The school crest has a Latin quotation: ‘Lux et veritas’ (Light and Truth).
There are more photographs inside. I turn the pages, running my fingers over the images. Some of them are class photographs on a tiered stage. Girls at the front are seated with knees together and hands clasped on their laps. The middle row girls are standing and those at the back must be perched on an unseen bench. I study the captions, the names, the class, the year.
There she is- my beloved- the whore’s whore. Second row. Fourth from the right. She had a brown bob. A round face. A half-smile. You were eighteen years old. I was still ten years away. Ten years. How many Sundays is that?
I tuck the school yearbook under my arm and get a second can of beer. Upstairs a computer hums on my desk. I type in the password and call up an online telephone directory. The screen refreshes. There were forty-eight girls in the leaving year of 1988. Forty-eight names. I won’t find her today. Not today, but soon.
Maybe I’ll watch the video again. I like watching one of them fall.
5
Charlie is dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, dancing with Emma in the lounge. The music is turned up loud and she lifts Emma onto her hip and spins her round, dipping her backwards. Emma giggles and snorts with laughter.
‘You be careful. You’ll make her throw up.’
‘Look at our new trick.’
Charlie hoists Emma onto her shoulders and leans forward, letting the youngster crawl down her back.
‘Very clever. You should join the circus.’
Charlie has grown up so much in the past few months it’s nice to see her acting like a kid again, playing with her sister. I don’t want her to grow up too quickly. I don’t want her becoming one of the girls I see roaming around Bath with pierced navels and ‘I-slept-with-your-boyfriend’ T-shirts.
Julianne has a theory. Sex is more explicit everywhere except in real life. She says teenage girls may dress like Paris Hilton and dance like Beyonce but that doesn’t mean they’re making amateur porn videos or having sex over car bonnets. Please, God, I hope she’s right.
I can already see the changes in Charlie. She is going through that monosyllabic stage where no words are wasted on her parents.
She saves them up for her friends and spends hours texting on her mobile and chatting online.
Julianne and I talked about sending her to boarding school when we moved out of London, but I wanted to kiss her goodnight each evening and wake her of a morning. Julianne said I was trying to make up for the time I didn’t spend with my own father, God’s-personal-physician-in-waiting, who sent me to boarding school from the age
