He slips out into the near-dark. On the narrow streets between terraces, his trainers make hardly any noise. The pavements glisten under soft yellow lights. He remembers the night, almost two years ago, when his mother-in-law and her lover persuaded him to join them on a naturists’ promenade round the streets of Newton Aycliffe. What a night that was! He flinches automatically from the memory. But it is bliss to be out with bare arms and legs, running till it becomes thoughtless. This must be one of the last nights of the year for being out like this. It strikes him how quiet the streets are. Are people that scared?
Mark thinks, I’m doing my own reclaiming of the night. Whenever he sees someone by themselves, a woman alone or a child, he crosses the road so he’s not coming up behind them or having to run towards them. He has to keep that distance. He hasn’t seen any of the rough lads from over the Forsyths’ house in a while. Whatever the phrase ‘rough lads’ means, anyway. Mark supposes that, when he was their age, he was a ‘rough lad’ too. He still has a shaved head. He thinks people are overreacting to these lads on the estate. It doesn’t do any good to get too alarmed. It puts all the power on the aggressor’s side. Those lads could rule the place now. Look how empty the streets are tonight. People prisoners in their own homes.
Tonight as Mark runs, as he starts to sweat, he feels like throwing off his gym kit and running naked but for tattoos. He feels free to run where he wants.
At last, coming round on his second circuit, he starts to plod, to weary. His legs shake. He stops in the main road and, outside the Forsyths’ old house, he sees a minicab slow to a halt. Craig clambers out with his bags and looks around at the street. He’s looking smart and sure of himself. His gaze lights on Mark immediately. Unhurriedly he feels for taxi change.
“Now then, lad,” says Craig, tight-lipped.
Mark crosses the main road to see him. Mark feels light and loose-limbed, the opposite of the thickset, powerful boy. Mark comes to stand by Craig. Now then, Mark thinks. He hates this about Aycliffe men. Their bluff, bullying, obvious insecurity. He gets called ‘lad’ by Craig, fifteen years his junior.
“You’re back then,” Mark says. He feels at a loss. Craig still hunts around for money. “I reckon Penny will be pleased.”
“Do you know who I was staying with?” Craig looks at him.
“No, I —”
“Andy.”
“Oh. How’s he doing?”
“You should go and see him, Mark.”
Mark smiles. “All the way up to Edinburgh?”
Craig is insistent. “He has something for you.”
“What?”
Craig shoulders his bags and turns to the Forsyth house. He hands the impatient driver the exact change. “An addition to your family.”
“Don’t let that taxi go!” This is Fran, running slap-slap-slap on her slippers from Penny’s house.
Craig and Mark turn to stare.
The taxi has just pulled away. Craig darts after it. A burst of speed and he’s rapping on the driver’s window, forcing him to stop. Craig looks smug. They look startled at Craig. Where did that speed come from? Isn’t he meant to be lame?
Penny comes up after Fran.
“We’re going to the hospital,” she tells Mark.
“Did you lock up your house properly?” asks Fran. This is the kind of thing she frets about.
“Where did you come from?” Penny asks Craig sharply.
“Scotland,” he says, grinning even though he doesn’t want to. “I came back.” His month away seems like a lifetime. The longest month of his life. He looks at Penny now, her long, mousy, distressed hair, her shapeless dress, her thick socks fallen round her ankles. He’s missed her.
“What’s the hurry?”
“The hospital phoned. Mam’s woken up.”
Craig feels this like a physical blow. “You what?”
“They’ve known that she was…coming near the surface, but she’s back!”
“Come with us!” Fran tells him. She bundles them all—Mark included — into the cab.
“Bishop General,” she snaps at the driver, plonking herself in the passenger seat and noting that the meter is already running. There is a sickly smell of forest-floor potpourri. It would be cheaper to buy a car, she thinks, than taking a taxi in every catastrophe.
All the way there, Craig feels ill.
“See?” Penny bursts out triumphantly as the cab negoti-ates the dark country lanes on the way to Bishop. “Nesta and the others didn’t do any harm after all! They did the opposite! They must have done Mam good!”
Fran looks round and gives a sickly, worried smile. A death’s-head Hallowe’en grin of reassurance she’d be better off not bothering with. Penny sits uptight, scared, grinning madly back. She looks out of the window, feels Mark’s hand on her lap. He sits tense and sweating between her and Craig. It occurs to her suddenly that since she last saw her mam she has fucked both these fellers. Craig looks less cocky now than she has ever seen him. What’s his problem? It isn’t his mother on the slab.
On the crackly radio Abba sing ‘Voulez Vous’. To break the tension, the taxi driver starts to tell Fran why he called his firm Tiger Taxis.
“All that itching,” Penny says suddenly, “was scabies!” She leans right across Mark’s lap to tell Craig. She practically shouts it in his face. He looks so stubborn and dull she wants to shake him. “I went to the doctors to get it sorted out. You bastard! That was scabies you gave me!”
Craig blanches, and so does Fran.
Craig asks Mark, “If she had it, did you get scabies as well?”
“Who off?” Mark asks.
“Her.”
“Me?” gasps Penny. “How would he get it off me?”
“Ha!” Craig turns to see her. His face all twisted up. “Andy told me what you wrote to him. How you shagged the bloke with tattoos.”
“Oh,” says Penny.
They
