“Are you going somewhere?”
Penny called from the top landing. She spoke with that guarded, almost frosty voice she’d been using with him just lately. What have I done to her? he thought. Maybe she had been odd in anticipation of this moment. She’d known for a while I was going to walk out on her. If I leave number sixteen, he thought, then Penny is here by herself.
“Yeah,” he said, looking up. She was wrapped in a towel, heading for the bathroom. “Are you going to your nanna’s again?” she asked. She looks scared, he thought.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Weren’t you going to tell me you were going?”
He smiled. “Yeah. I was.”
“Were you?” What do I sound like? Penny wondered. He can come and go as he pleases. It’s nothing to do with me.
“Listen,” he began. He didn’t say anything else.
After a moment of staring at each other, up and down the stairs, she said, “This time last year this house was chockablock.”
“I know.” He smiled. “I’ll phone when I get there. give you the number.”
“Right,” she said, and watched him hurry down the rest of the stairs. “Wait,” she said. “You’ll need some cash. You’ve not got anything.” She came down the stairs.
“What have you got?” he asked. “You can’t afford—”
“Liz left me a bit,” she said and, with that, went to the dresser and unearthed an envelope full of notes.
Wordlessly he took it. Once more he headed for the front door.
After it slammed there was a momentary silence in which she held her breath. She could picture Andy doing the same thing outside. Then he did what they both knew he was going to do, and put his house keys through the letter box. The metal flap clacked and the keys arrived in a sudden jangle.
SEVENTEEN
If there’s one thing I’ve had to become, it’s self-sufficient. I don’t need anyone in the house with me. Imagine living in a place where when you put something down, it stays there.
Here was Penny in the middle of the afternoon. She was sitting on the tyre swing in the kids’ play park. These were good places to mull things over. Her boots were planted firmly on the gravel and she felt suspended, hunched up in her cardy. It was coming in cold. Here came that snow they were talking about. This winter was never going to end.
Penny looked at the houses around her in Phoenix Court. All full of people. People squabbled and grabbed things. They shouted in your face, exerted their demands on you. You had to take notice. My house was as busy as the rest, she thought. Now I could do with some time on my own.
This afternoon I should go and see my mother. She lies in Bishop Auckland, waiting. She doesn’t know any different, but she’s putting on that guilt. That easy emotional blackmail. Even the nurses there think I’m awful. They think I’ve abandoned Liz. Is she as good as dead? Andy said I shouldn’t give up hope and I was shocked at the suggestion I had...but perhaps I have. Whatever’s lying in Bishop Auckland isn’t my mam. She’s like someone made up.
Mark came out to see Penny.
She looked up from the swing. “We’re like kids, meeting in the park after school.”
“You’re going to catch your death,” he said.
“Andy’s gone off somewhere. He packed a couple of bags and wouldn’t say where he was going to.”
“Right,” said Mark. He thought about Andy for a second, but didn’t have much of a picture of him. I’ve slept with him, Mark frowned, but I can’t recall much about it. He remembered more of what he’d seen of Andy in the gym. Sometimes sex was too close up.
“Come and have some tea with me,” he told Penny.
She smiled. “Is that a good idea?”
Mark shrugged. “I reckon so.”
He held out his hand. He wore a plain yellow shirt and the sleeves were rolled up. Oh, what a colour he was in this grey afternoon. She stared at the hand offered to her. What was on it? The thing with Mark’s tattoos was that you could focus on one thing at a time. Something would jump out at you and snag your attention, then the rest would become a backdrop. Everything on him jostled and competed for your attention. On his palm, among other things, there was an eye. Which, as she looked, became a perfect blue egg wedged in the stretched jaws of a snake, which heaped its manicured coils around and around Mark’s forearm.
“Take my hand,” Mark said.
She took it, prepared to hop off the swing. Under her own palm that drawn eyeball flinched. She felt its lashes brush the tender part of her wrist. The snake shivered and squirmed as he helped her up.
“Something happens,” she said, “whenever we—”
“I know.” He grinned. “Sssh.”
Penny touched her fingertips to the orange triangles she saw poking out from under his shirt. They were the petals of a tiger lily and the pollen was thick and felty.
In the days when they were happy they played some funny games. You do, don’t you? Looked at cold, it might seem perverse or kinky. But that’s not what it was like at all.
I loved Tom. When I first saw him at the fair, the day he took me round the back of the generator, I could see he had more to him. He had a mystique. He came from somewhere else. There was a power to him.
When we were happy he loved playing those games, too. Sex was something he blushed about. He was like a boy about sex. For someone so worldly like Tom, it was funny to see him get
