Jane shrugged. ‘We don’t want to be left with her rotten kids, do we? We’ve got our own, haven’t we? It’s bound to happen sooner or later, anyway.’
‘We’ll just have to see. She might turn up yet.’
‘I’m just off to buy more beefburgers. I don’t think that Vicki’s been fed in her life. She was up all night wolfing custard creams.’
This time Liz had left a note for Penny. It was waiting for her when she came downstairs, late, at nine thirty. When she walked into the front room she knew something was up because the stereo wasn’t on, there were no curling tongs left lying around, and no one swirling around the place in her housecoat, full of the joys of spring.
Penny dear,
I’ve already gone.
I’ve gone to look at a bus station.
Cliff insisted.
Aren’t you late for school?
Liz was sitting on a wooden bench, one arm flung along the back and legs crossed. She picked idly at a scab of hardened chewing gum with her nails.
She was smoking heavily to cut out the greasy diesel fumes. Everywhere there was the sound of groaning machinery, chain-smokers waking, the early birds lurching into the depot with pneumatic squeals. But she liked this place. Plenty was happening. She was glad, too, that Cliff had brought her at the crack of dawn.
She watched him running about, from the frosted-windowed staff room to the buses, greeting other men in blue nylon trousers, jumping on and off buses, opening their rubber-hinged doors with a proprietorial air, patting the bonnets of the others as he passed. He was showing off, but she would let him, for this morning.
He came up to her, grinning. ‘They all want to meet you. They’ve all seen you sitting here. Everyone wants to know who you are.’
‘The buses?’
‘The blokes. I’ve told them you’re with me.’
He hasn’t got much of a sense of humour, Liz thought. Bless him!
He led her to the staff room. Inside someone was whistling ‘Love Is a Many-Splendoured Thing’. The first line only, over and over again. Around a Formica table scattered with fag packets and timetables, six men were having an argument about Daktari. What was the lion’s name; Florence or Elsa?
‘It was Clarence,’ Liz told them. ‘Clarence the Cross-eyed Lion.’
They all looked at her.
‘This,’ Cliff said, ‘is the woman I love.’
Rose gave Ethan a hand to get his leg back on. She was getting ' the hang of it now. He fumbled dressing, asking all the while 1 why Andy was there. His tetchiness and his slowness took Rose by surprise. This is how he’ll be when he’s old, she thought. An invalid. With me caring for him. His novelty might soon wear off. She hoped not.
‘He didn’t say. He looks upset, mind.’ Rose stood by the doorway. ‘He doesn’t look anything like you, you know. For a relative.’
Downstairs they found him watching This Morning.
‘Now then, Andrew. What’s all this about?’
Andy was keeping his eyes downcast, on Richard and Judy doing the phone-in. Richard had just asked some poor woman if her problem was that she was too dry. ‘They’re discussing women’s health problems,’ he said.
‘What did you have to see me about so urgently?’ His uncle’s voice was full of that menacing power again. Andy turned to look at him.
‘We have to talk about where I’m going to live.’ And suddenly he looked helpless. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
Ethan sat down heavily on Rose’s overstuffed sofa. He could manage that now without looking. He’s settling in, Rose thought, and took herself off to make some fresh tea.
Jane was coming up the garden path, looking harassed.
‘What’s the matter?’ Rose asked, head out of the window, afterglow dissipating in the wet breeze. Jane stomped into the kitchen, slamming the door.
‘I’ve been turned into a bloody nursemaid, that’s what!’
‘Who by? What’s —’
‘That Nesta woman round the corner’s done a bunk, and —’ Jane stopped and listened. Two male voices could be heard clearly from the living room. Two male voices and, in the background, agony aunt Denise Robertson.
‘What’s going on here?’ Jane asked.
They let Liz ride for free that day. ‘I feel like an old-age pensioner,’ she said with a grin, standing next to Cliff. All his loose change was jangling in the dispenser at his side. ‘A pensioner with an everlasting bus pass and no desire to get off.’
The countryside outside Darlington, muggy and olive green, went swirling by. Their bus was as yet empty.
‘You’ll never be a pensioner,’ Cliff insisted with his eyes on the road. ‘I can’t actually picture you being old.’
She considered. ‘No. Neither can I.’
They pulled into a little village, an up-market village featuring a suitably picturesque ginger pony in a tiny field. The bus began to fill.
‘I haven’t asked where we’re going yet,’ she observed over the top of somebody’s headscarf.
‘The Metro Centre. Straight up the motorway.’ He slammed his palm down on the dashboard and Radio Two burst out of every speaker. ‘God, I love the motorway.’
Liz grasped her handrail and tottered expertly on her heels, buffeted by the acceleration. Cliff’s glossy black head was inching nearer to the steering wheel, his elbows flexing out like wings. Pensioners went scuttling for their seats.
‘Yeah — straight up the motorway and then an afternoon spent with you.’
‘An afternoon?’ she asked. A bus driver’s lot was beginning to sound like quite a cushy number.
‘Important business. We’re going shopping.’
They hurtled north, into the driving rain.
Detective Inspector Collins waited for Tony to haul himself out of her car. He had a bit of bother doing this, because he was cupping something precious in both palms. Collins grunted as she locked her car behind him and firmly led the way to Fran’s house.
Fran was waiting. She was wondering what she should say about the Dog Man, and whether such a thing was worth mentioning. Tony was following the policewoman, head bowed. Collins seemed impervious to the rain, eyes hard, face clenched like a fist. You could chop sticks on
