Bob had got used to being or not being fussed over by the women. He had gone through a fallow period when he was no longer a child, and felt it resume when he joined the force and moved to his own place. The ladies were delighted by their boy in a uniform. But they did want to know when he would bring home another woman. In the past couple of years he had felt the need for that fond respectfulness that his father had thrived on. Being celebrated as the ladies’ clever, brave boy wasn’t good enough for ever, really.
He imagined all their lives settling down into another pattern, and hoped he had it right. The way he saw it, it was going to get better, and they would see that he was right.
It gave him a glow of pleasure, anticipating the rightness of how things might turn out. Of course Mark was wrong for Sam; that was one of the things about these lives that was just so wrong. Bob was amazed, really, that they couldn’t any of them see it. There was nothing reassuring or stoically strong about Mark. Observed from afar, admittedly, he looked unreliable. Those tattoos of his shrieked his unworthiness, right across the road those few times Bob had caught glimpses of him, while he was sitting out in his car. Oh, Mark might have been doing things like picking up Sally from school, or a few bits of shopping, quiet domestic things, but Bob wasn’t tricked. To him Mark was the epitome of a suspected felon. Christmas Eve confirmed it, really. Bob was used to meeting people in strange, calamitous circumstances; that was when the stresses in their characters showed, and that first meeting with Mark had confirmed everything for him. Mark was the sort who needed an eye kept on him.
Bob remembered his mam playing cards once, on a Saturday night. She showed him how to make a card house. He must have been about eleven. His sisters were all at the age when they liked to go out, and his mam had felt sorry for him. She devised things for them to do on Saturday nights. Those were the days when she wore a black wig; they were fashionable then. When he had been quite a bit smaller he had pulled at it carelessly and brought it off. He had run screaming from the room, thinking he had pulled her whole head off. His mam and sisters brought this up for years afterwards, shaking with laughter at him.
The card house had grown bigger and bigger on the nest of tables. His mother watched the telly through it and stacked up storey after storey. When she finished, she had run through two decks of well-used cards. She turned and smiled at him. He hardly dared to move.
“Now, son,” he said, “you knock it down.”
“You want me to?”
“It’ll happen sooner or later,” she said. “The slightest breeze when you open the door. It’s best to do it yourself, and then build it back how you want. The fun is in seeing how it all comes down.”
Bob took a deep breath and blew it down. His mam applauded.
The force had changed him, she told him seriously, after his first six months; but she knew that would happen. So long as he remembered where he had come from. His sisters looked at him with new respect, as did his aunties. His father even seemed cowed by him.
Then he started coming in drunk after training. He fell out of the patio window and lay bleeding in the garden in the dark. New, painted veins ran up his arms, down his shirt and trousers when his mother came running down to find him, twitching on the grass. She didn’t even have to open the door to get to him; the patio had been done on the cheap and he had wrecked it.
“Come on, then,” she said, looking at him, “let’s see you put this one back together,” before rushing in to phone an ambulance.
And he had. He’d pulled himself together and made a success of his life. Bob felt at times that the only thing in life, the only thing you needed to know, was how to gain a woman’s respect. With that you could do anything. As far as he was concerned, women ruled the world. They made you powerful when they were proud of you, and you needed that power to make the world tick. And the world ticked, steady and strong as the motor before him, the rhythm of the song on the radio.
The moon was shading out now, licked over by tatters of cloud. Other cars were pulling out of the services and resuming their journey. Her indigestion was settling; he was eager to be getting on.
“AT LEAST SHE ASKED US. SHE NEEDN’T HAVE BOTHERED. IN FACT, I thought she would have refused if we asked her.”
“You’re right,” Peggy said. “But I couldn’t see her refusing, though. She couldn’t’ve. Not today. Sally’s more important that our squabbles. She’s part of both of us, Sam and me.”
In her own cubicle Iris sighed and tugged her knickers back up. They had been calling out over the partitions. Peggy felt a bit uncomfortable in this, even though they were both sure that they’d heard Sam clip-clop across the tiles out of the ladies’. She’d gone off to buy Extra Strong Mints for the journey. Her stomach was playing up with anxiety and her breath was vile. Not the best condition for a reunion with her daughter.
Peggy did wonder how Sam would feel about seeing Sally again. She tried
