“I thought—well, listen, Colette, I’m sure you’re as tired of Morris as I am. I don’t know if he’d ever agree to— you know—take his pension—I think Mandy was being a bit optimistic there. But our lives would be easier, wouldn’t they, if his friends didn’t come round?”
“His friends?” Colette said blankly.
Oh, Jesus, Al said to herself, it’s all uphill work. “He’s beginning to meet up with his friends,” she explained. “I don’t know why he feels the need, but it seems he does. There’s one called Don Aitkenside. I remember him. He had a mermaid on his thigh. And this Dean, now, he’s new to me, but I don’t like the sound of him. He was in the back of the car just now. Spotty kid. Got a police record.”
“Really?” Colette’s flesh crawled. “In the back?”
“With Morris and Don.” Al pushed her plate away. “And now Morris is off looking for this gypsy.”
“Gypsy? But there won’t be room!”
Alison just looked at her sadly. “They don’t take up room, in the usual way,” she said.
“No. Of course not. It’s the way you talk about them.”
“I can’t think how else to talk. I only have the usual words.”
“Of course you do, but it makes me think—I mean it makes me think they’re ordinary blokes, except I can’t see them.”
“I hope they’re not. Not ordinary. I mean, I hope the standard is better than that.”
“You never knew Gavin.”
“Did he smell?”
Colette hesitated. She wanted to be fair. “Not more than he could help.”
“He’d take a bath, would he?”
“Oh yes, a shower.”
“And he wouldn’t, sort of, undo his clothes and take out private bits of himself in public?”
“No!”
“And if he saw a little girl on the street, he wouldn’t turn around and make comments about her? Like, look at it waggle its little arse?”
“You frighten me, Al,” Colette said coldly.
I know, Al thought. Why mention it now?
“You have a very peculiar imagination. How can you think I would marry a man like that?”
“You might not know. Till you’d tied the knot. You might have had a nasty surprise.”
“I wouldn’t have been married to that kind of a man. Not for an instant.”
“But he had magazines, did he?”
“I never looked at them.”
“It’s on the Internet, these days.”
Colette thought, I should have searched his systems. But those were early days, as far as technology went. People weren’t sophisticated, like they are now.
“He used to call hotlines,” she admitted. “Once I myself, just out of curiosity—”
“Did you? What happened?”
“They kept you hanging on for ages. Just messing you about, basically, while you were running up a bill. I put the phone down. I thought, what will it be? Just some woman pretending to come. Moaning, I suppose.”
“You could do that for yourself,” Al said.
“Precisely.”
“If we moved, we might be able to lose them. I suppose Morris will stick, but I’d like to shake off his friends.”
“Wouldn’t they come after us?”
“We’d go somewhere they don’t know.”
“Don’t they have maps?”
“I don’t think they do. I think it’s more like … they’re more like dogs. They have to pick up the scent.”
In the LADIES, she watched her own face in the mirror, as she washed her hands. Colette must be coaxed towards a house move, she must be made to see the sense. Yet she must not be terrified too much. Last night the tape had frightened her, but how could that have been prevented? It was a shock to me too, she said to herself. If Morris has caught up with Aitkenside, can Capstick be far behind? Will he be bringing home MacArthur, and lodging him in the bread bin or her dressing table drawer? Will she sit down to breakfast one day and find Pikey Pete lurking under the lid of the butter dish? Will she get a sudden fright, as Bob Fox taps at the window?
Move on, she thought: it might baffle them for a bit. Even a temporary bewilderment could keep them off your back. It might cause them to disperse, lose each other again in those vast tracts the dead inhabit.
“Oi, oi, oi oi!” Morris called, yelling right in her ear. “Bob’s your uncle!”
