Gemma Makes Her Mark

them. In fact, it had left Mark feeling quite down – he andMartin had shared many evenings drinking and getting wasted in theold days, just after Mark had started his job at Sussex Universityand before Justine and his prison sentence, but on this occasionMartin had seemed distracted and keen to get rid of him. Of courseMartin was busy with his work but they hadn’t met up for over sixyears and Mark had hoped for a little more than what feltdistinctly like a brush-off. Martin had said enough to suggest thathearing about the murders had both amazed and horrified him; as itapparently had for most of their old friends. He did manage to findout that Martin, Tom, Paul and the rest still met up regularly andthat Justine and Tom were still together and apparently on thepoint of getting married. Martin had clearly felt somewhatembarrassed by the whole thing and had dodged answering Mark’ssuggestion that he bring Gemma over to meet up and perhaps have ameal or drinks together.

Mark haddriven back to Littlehampton afterwards feeling a complete outsider– they might consider themselves open-minded and hip, but serialmurdering was obviously a step too far for his old friends. He’dbeen close to them all for years, but they had all had it easierthan him from the start. Most of his university friends had comefrom public school backgrounds and well-off families and had allmanaged to do pretty well for themselves in various legitimatepursuits, including property management and the music business.When all had been going along smoothly for himself, Mark hadenjoyed their self-confidence and entrepreneurial spirits; and withhis position as a university lecturer and published academic he hadfelt at least their equal. He could see it had never been a realequivalence, though, and maybe they’d always felt it; theypossessed and paraded their own hubris with irritating ease.Background and family status clearly still gave a different andunique kind of arrogance. Anyway, to hell with them, he had hislife to get on with.

***

Mark looked athis watch. It was half past five, the sun was still hot on his backand playing on the grass in the field behind the house – surelymore than ready for a first cut and bailing for hay. He was gladhe’d put his shorts on. Gemma couldn’t understand his reluctance toshow his legs but he’d never been comfy with it, unless he’d beenon a beach. He had worn jeans, or between 1975 and 1981 the prisonequivalent, ever since he was a teenager and he saw little reasonto change the habit. The compromise had been to cut an old pair ofWranglers off just above the knee, and to be fair it felt quitegood today.

He reckonedGemma would be back in ten minutes or so – time to put the burgersand a couple of pork chops on the grill. He still couldn’t quiteshake off a restlessness that had been with him on and off for awhile, and was becoming more on of late, and that was reflected inhis mood that afternoon as it veered from contentedness todespondency. It was well into summer and he needed to be doing morethan filling time; he’d already done enough of that to last for alifetime. It had been too easy to let things drift, though. He wasbecoming too used to basically just pottering around in a desultorybut often really quite pleasant way – doing the shopping andcooking, checking local sales and ads. He still had some savingsand Gemma’s salary covered the mortgage and other bills. And healways managed to find something to keep him at leastsemi-occupied. There was that year’s Ashes series to watch and ithad been difficult to take his eyes off the third test which hadfinished a few days ago. The cricket had been unbelievable: Englandwere following on and heading for defeat when Ian Botham played aremarkable innings, 149 runs from 148 balls; then Bob Willis hadtaken eight wickets, the Australians were bowled out for 111 andthe series was levelled. It had been pretty compulsive viewing aswell as taking care of a good part of the day and he couldn’t waitfor the next match, but it wasn’t moving his life on. Then a coupleof weeks before that he’d got side-tracked following thestreet-fighting and rioting in Liverpool and Manchester. While itmight not have had much impact on day-to-day life in rural Sussex,Mark had been gripped by the social significance of it, as well asthe anger and hatred shown toward Margaret Thatcher and hergovernment. He could imagine the sociologists he had worked withattempting to analyse and explain it all; no doubt it wouldencourage a glut of conference papers and PhD proposals. He’d hadto fight the fleeting nostalgia he still felt for that life – fairenough, a lot of it might have been the emperor’s new clothes butit was comfy enough and held a certain cachet.

If he washonest about it and even though he wouldn’t call his currentlifestyle unpleasant, Mark couldn’t ignore the fact that he wasbeginning to harbour the occasional concern, or maybe moreaccurately realisation, that living with Gemma was perhaps notreally what he had expected when he’d been planning and fantasisingabout his life after prison. She was gorgeous and sexy, but maybenot as pliable or, although he hated to admit it, as controllableas he would have liked. Typically, though, Mark was too botheredabout his own situation and feelings to give any of his slightdoubts more than a momentary acknowledgement before storing themaway in the recesses of his consciousness. So what if Gemma didn’tseem to be as easily impressed with him as he’d imagined she hadbeen? That was life, no doubt. Anyway, the way he remembered it shehad pretty much thrown herself at him so he had nothing to reproachhimself for there. The niggling worry, though, was that he’d gothis character assessments spectacularly wrong before, of course.Gemma had made one or two throwaway comments lately that wereplaying on his mind: nothing specific, but comments the gist ofwhich seemed to be that given the money her family, or moreaccurately mother, had, she didn’t see why she should be the oneworking while he managed