And there it was. He blinked away the warm water and stared. Under his left arm, printed boldly across the numbed muscle. About the size of a ten-pence piece and a kind of glossy purple black. He had a single leopard’s spot staring back at him.
Andy turned off the shower. He stepped out to dry himself, almost slipping. He thought quickly and hard. He wouldn’t look at the spot on his arm again.
Craig walked in as Andy dried himself. They both looked confused. Craig said, “Look how your body’s coming on.”
Andy stared at himself. His muscles seemed suddenly hard and heavy to him. But he wasn’t sure why. He looked down at himself, but he no longer felt like his own man.
Penny was in the arcade in Darlington when she saw Mark. He was in that clothes shop where everything was on offer with a 70 per cent discount. She realised that she hadn’t been in that shop, just because Andy reckoned there must be a rip-off involved. You didn’t get something that cheap, he said. Penny went in. It’s funny how people can put you off things.
Mark was with his daughter, who was about ten. The girl was standing by, looking bored as Mark folded and unfolded rather bright shirts and tops. He noticed Penny.
“What do you think?” He held a tight yellow T-shirt against himself. She saw at once that it was too young on him. But his blueness and the sharpness of his tattoos looked stunning.
He pulled a face and shrugged. “No?”
Penny couldn’t help asking, “Do you have to buy plain clothes, I mean, clothes without patterns, so you don’t clash with your designs?”
His daughter gave a snort of laughter. Mark smiled. “I do, actually. At one point I never even thought about it. I wore checks and all sorts. Then Sam, my ex-wife, said I looked like a dog’s dinner. I’ve got better since then.” He pushed through a rack of velour tops, frowning. Penny thought that she, too, would grow neglectful of the sort of clothes she wore, if she were covered with tattoos. Clothes would seem too prosaic.
“Are you helping your dad?” Penny asked the child.
Mark’s daughter gave Penny a look. “Dad, can I have my pocket money now? I want to go to Smith’s.”
Then she was gone, cutting through the Saturday crowd. Mark shrugged. “She’s at that difficult age.”
Penny thought back to being ten. “She’s getting a filthy mouth on her. She answers back. She’s foul-tempered. She half understands things. And she throws tantrums like she never did as a baby.” He sighed. “Sometimes I feel treacherous. I wish she was little again. I preferred her that way.”
“That’s natural.”`
“And sometimes I think, I’m even glad she lives with her mother and not me. It’s a relief sometimes.”
Penny smiled. “We’re allowed treacherous thoughts.” She was thinking, Since when did I know this man well enough to hear him talk like this? He was looking at her as if they were always meeting up.
They caught the bus back to Aycliffe together. They had a forty-minute wait for the 213. Outside McDonald’s they queued and chatted. He asked the inevitable questions about Liz. Penny stood with her groceries from Marksies between her knees.
“You’ve got posh shopping,” he noticed.
“I’m doing a nice meal,” she said. “For Craig and his mother.”
“Craig’s your boyfriend.”
Penny nodded. She still found it odd to hear him called that. She felt vaguely proud and distressed by the term. But she put these qualms to the back of her mind. He seemed to adore her and he was attentive and so, for now, he would do. What grated was the rest of his life, which Penny found herself taking on wholesale. Elsie had become a mother-in-law in a way Penny could see she had longed to. And now, with the extra stress of Tom’s disappearance, Penny felt even more heavily leaned on. Elsie turned automatically to her clever, dependable Penny to see her through and to say the sensible things. And I’m playing up to that, Penny thought. I’m cooking them dinner and keeping the family together.
“So don’t you see as much of Andy these days?” Mark asked. Penny could have sworn she saw, as he said this, the creeping of a blush behind his tattoos.
“I still see him every day, of course,” she said. It wasn’t the same in the house, though. They used to do every day together, consult the other about everything. Now Penny drifted off round Craig’s and ended up chatting with Elsie and hearing her woes. Andy was in a world of his own. Penny hated to think she had made him worse. He had turned almost secretive. Something was up and she no longer felt in a strong enough position to ask what it was. He wouldn’t take her seriously, she thought. We aren’t fond enough of each other at the moment. When people live as close as we do, they have to be tougher and quieter sometimes.
She thought Mark had a nerve, though, asking about Andy.
“You really pissed him off, you know,” she said.
He looked taken aback.
“I know what went on,’ Penny said, keeping her voice down for the sake of the child. She wished she hadn’t started this. Now there really was a flush between the markings on his face.
“I don’t know how much Andy’s told you,” Mark said. “But it was never meant to be more than a one-night stand. Honest. I thought he was clear on that. It was just —”
“You don’t believe that,” Penny said flatly. “He’s a lovely bloke. You just fucked
