These were tiny, deliberately footfalls in his room, and Sally’s door was still safely shut. Somebody was being extra careful. They could be the sound of a long, long approach; carefulness from a very great distance. He lay still and vaguely enjoyed the thoughtfulness and respect of whoever it was.
Then, a terrible creak of floorboards. Something was definitely up. He had to do something, now; anybody with any sense would. The sound of weight on old wood was close by him and required reaction. Slowly Mark drew back the covers and lay ready to jump up. His body was knotted with that back-breaking tension of being disturbed in the middle of the night.
He was looking out into the dark, but the round window gave out only a narrow channel of milky light, showing a harmless chair in the corner. Mark felt a hand touch lightly on his shin. He wouldn’t look. There was no sound, no breathing yet; nothing palpable other than the hand, and then another, pausing and then pushing a little weight on him to see what he would do.
They were caught in a deadlock; he refused to do anything until the hands declared responsibility by manifesting a full presence. The hands waited there as if for an invitation. Mark could believe, there in the dark, that their owner existed in some other place, in another dimension. The signals he was getting from his body were now so muffled by alcohol and exhaustion that he felt he had no responsibility towards them; it was all a million miles away.
One of the hands reached a decision and moved the length of him, removing itself at his thigh, hovering, pondering; the other was still at his knee, as if waiting to hear from its mate.
Summoning his breath, Mark asked, “Richard?”
Both hands left him for a second and Mark thought they were gone. Then one palm was pressed down on his chest, fingers slow and questing; the other hand rejoined him tentatively at the tip of his erection. He hadn’t known he had one; he was so distant by now that it could have been something supplied by that returning hand.
When one touched his face in a caress, he felt the slight brush of fabric; the hands wore gloves. As he arced his spine and it cracked, he was twisting slightly, raising himself. The hand worked steadily, worked him off in a sure, palpating grip. Both hands were stark white.
A slow hiss of suppressed breath could be heard now under the gasps Mark felt himself giving out. One hand roamed his face and neck and pushed him down against the pillows suddenly as he came.
The deep slide into unconsciousness began again and the two hands reunited themselves to smear sperm across his stomach and chest, easing him to sleep with a balm of his own making.
THE MOON WAS STILL OUT, BUT BOB WAS USED TO EARLY STARTS. WHILE he waited in the car he had the engine turning over nicely, his first fag on the go and Radio One turned up. He hung one arm out of his window and drummed on the paintwork, relishing the cold now that the car was warming through inside.
The could keep this day in some perspective if only he regarded it as just another day’s work. He was trained to cope with emergencies and that was exactly what today was. He was a policeman and knew how to draw himself back from other people’s panic and act sensibly. That was all he had to do today, keep a cool head on. He would get them through. He just had to drive, act as a soothing influence and not allow himself to pick up Sam’s bristling air of rage and worry. If he got sucked into that, he’d be no use at all to her.
The moon was set in a blue so tender it forced the early starts to squint away. Its fresh resilience shamed their tiredness. Bob felt cramped and knotted up with tension; he had indigestion from bolting his breakfast and leaving the house without a cigarette. Sitting in the car park, he waited for Sam, Iris and Peggy to finish their business in the services, and watched the sky.
Sam had instructed him last thing last night that Iris and Peggy would be coming with them. She had obviously thought it through and decided that he couldn’t leave them out. When they pulled up outside Iris’s cottage this morning, in the waning dark, Bob had been slightly nervous of them. He needn’t have worried; they were much too preoccupied to think anything of him.
“This is Bob,” Sam had said pointedly as they froze on the front doorstep. She refused to enter Iris’s house.
Peggy had given him a quick once-over. “Thanks for offering to drive us,” she said.
He wondered, perhaps she felt as daft as he did. She was the one, after all, he’d seen wandering around starkers. She was probably grateful he hadn’t run them in. It was well within his powers. She looked the sort, really, who would respect the police and take well to having one as a son-in-law. At least she would know then that her daughter and grandchild were safe.
Nothing else had been said about or to him. The women spoke to each other or not at all. All this made it easier for Bob to exert his reassuring stoicism.
Would this be how things would carry on when all this had blown over? He wouldn’t mind if it was. He knew how families of women worked and knew how to find his place in them. Men were best off keeping quiet and out of it; relied upon, gently mocked but, all in all, respected. In the first half-hour of this morning’s trip he had already sussed that this was how this lot worked.
It
