opened.
She put down the coffee and wandered around the room, opening cupboards and drawers until she found a tube of Slazenger tennis balls. They’d been there for two or three summers, since she’d got it into her head she was going to beat every woman in the constabulary tennis club at Portishead. She’d done it within six months. Then she turned her attention to the men. But none of the men would play with her after that, so she’d got bored and dropped it.
Ben was still in bed, still asleep. Zoe sat on the sofa arm with her back to the stairs and popped open the tin. The balls smelt of rubber and old summer grass. She tipped one out and bounced it once on the floor, then blew on it to clean off the fluff and grit. She rubbed it on her sleeve, opened her mouth wide, and pushed the ball in as far as it would go.
It went in surprisingly easily, lodging at its widest point between her teeth – half in, half out of her mouth. The dry, chemical-tasting nap pushed her tongue to the back of her mouth, kicking in the gag reflex. The impulse was to rip the ball out – she really believed she could hear the gristle in her jaw joint popping – but she dug her fingers into the arm of the sofa, closed her eyes and tried to breathe through it, forcing herself to picture the ball being taped into her mouth. Her body shook, sweat popped under her arms, little black and white stars burst against her retinas. And then, when she thought the skin at the edges of her mouth would split open, like Lorne’s had, she tugged the ball out and let it tumble to the floor, taking with it thick bands of saliva.
She sat back against the sofa, shaking, sucking in breath after breath, while on the floor the ball bounced and bounced. It hit the curtains and came to a juddering halt.
11
‘Hey. I found you.’ Steve stood in the kitchen doorway. He was naked, rubbing his eyes and stretching his arms above his head. ‘God, I slept well. I love it here.’
‘Sit down.’ Sally got an elastic band out of a drawer, bound Millie’s card to the outside of the pack and pushed it into the back of one of the drawers. She turned to check the milk that was heating on the stove. ‘I’ve got to get going. Got to be at work at nine.’
‘No time for hanky-panky, then?’
‘I’ve got to be at work.’
He smiled and stretched some more. His hands found the low ceiling and he used it to press himself down, bending his knees, lengthening his body and cracking the sleep out of his muscles. He was different in every way from Julian, who had been pale and hairless with soft arms and womanly hips. Steve was big, with dark hair and a solid, suntanned neck. His legs were hard and hairy, like a centaur’s. Looking at him now, stretching, was like watching one of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomy studies come to life.
She stood at the hob, whisking the milk into froth, shooting him surreptitious looks as he wandered around, yawning and checking inside the fridge. It had been four months since they’d got together and she still couldn’t quite believe he was here. Steve had given her sex on the brain: if she had even half an hour between cleaning jobs, she’d scurry over to his house and they’d end up naked on the kitchen floor. Or on the stairs, halfway up to the bedroom. It was totally different from being with Julian. Maybe she was having a mid-life crisis. At thirty-five.
Steve was in ‘corporate espionage’. Sally wasn’t entirely sure what that meant – but he always seemed to be dealing with people who lived in remote and glamorous places. His address book, which she’d seen lying open at his house one day, was crammed with addresses in countries like the Emirates, Liberia and South Africa, and more than once he’d had to set his alarm for the middle of the night so he could get up and take a conference call with someone in Peru or Bolivia. He wore a suit when he left the house in the morning, but in her imagination he wore a black polo-neck and jeans and had secret knives fitted in his soles. She had no idea why he wanted to be with someone as stupid as she was. Maybe it was because she was so easy. He only had to look at her and she’d roll backwards on to the bed, her legs open, a blank, grateful smile on her face.
‘So.’ He linked his fingers and cracked the knuckles. Rolled his head. ‘Where’re you working today?’
‘North.’
‘Not Goldrab again?’
‘No. Not today.’ She spooned frothy milk on to two cups of coffee, shook cocoa powder on to them from a metal flour-shaker and put a cup in front of him. She went back to the oven and busied herself with laying croissants on a tray. ‘Yesterday he offered me another job. Cleaning still, but doing the admin for his house too.’
‘Are you going to take it?’
‘It’s a lot of money.’
Steve stirred his coffee, thinking about this. ‘Look,’ he said, after a while, ‘I’ve never said anything, but the truth is I kind of worry about you when you’re there.’
‘Worry? Why?’
‘Put it this way – I know a lot about him. A lot I’d rather not know.’
She slammed the oven door, straightened and turned to him, pushing her hair from her forehead. ‘How?’
He laughed. ‘How long have you lived in Bath? You know that Disneyland ride, Small World, with the little kids singing, “It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears”? That’s Bath for you – a small, small world. Everyone knows everyone else’s business.’
She got jam and butter from the fridge, collected knives and napkins, thinking about this. He was right. They all sort of knew each other, or of each other – and people talked and gossiped so you never felt entirely disconnected from others, no matter if you hadn’t seen them for years. It was the way she got information about what Zoe was doing, for example (she didn’t dare ask Mum and Dad – for years she’d never spoken a word about Zoe to them, knowing the spectres it might raise if she did). The grapevine was also the way she’d first become aware of Steve – in the vague, amorphous way you got to know about the other parents at a school, even though his two children were much older than Millie and now at university. He and his ex had got divorced, it turned out, on the same day as Sally and Julian. Steve had heard vaguely about her separation through the grapevine and one day, months later, he’d seen her sitting in traffic in the pink HomeMaids Smart car. He’d called the number on its side and got the manager to put a call through to her. That was the thing about Bath. Really, it was just a big village. Sometimes it was a bit creepy. As if she couldn’t move without everyone knowing.
But, looking at Steve now, she didn’t quite believe the small-village scenario explained how he knew about David.
‘He’s not one of your…’ She searched for the word. What would he call him? A customer? A client? She knew so little about his job. ‘He hasn’t employed you, has he?’
‘No.’
‘But you still know a lot about him?’
Steve frowned. ‘Yeah… well,’ he said vaguely. ‘Maybe this is a bad time to talk about it. You know, first thing in the morning.’ He drew a newspaper nearer and began to read.
But Sally persisted. ‘I don’t know anything about your job. I feel a bit in the dark sometimes.’
He looked up at her. He had very clear grey eyes. ‘Sally, that’s the big drawback. If you know a bit about my job you know the lot.’
‘And then you’d have to kill me.’
‘And then I’d have to kill you.’ He gave an apologetic smile.
‘I do have to be careful. That’s all.’
‘But I work for him. And he is a bit… weird. Maybe you know something I should. Something important.’
He pursed his lips and tapped the rim of his cup thoughtfully with his nail, as if he was wondering what he could risk saying. After a while he pushed the cup away. ‘OK – I can tell you this much. Goldrab’s not paying me, it’s the other way round.
‘Investigate
‘That’s where the soul baring stops. I’m sorry. If you have to work for him, I can’t stop you. All I ask is you keep your wits about you.’
‘Oh,’ she said, feeling a little naive not to have cottoned on to this before. ‘How long have you been doing it?’
