FOUR

‘You look shaken. What’s up?’ Though her broad smile betrayed just how pleased she was to see him again, Sarah’s eyebrows surged into a pincer of concern. ‘Those hoodies at the end of the street again?’ She brushed ice off his shoulders and slapped the front door closed. Her skirt was shorter than he’d ever seen her daughter’s.

‘There were a few kids, yeah. Nothing worth stressing about. I’m a pro.’

There was no embarrassment about where she lived; inside it was bigger than his own flat, tidier, cleaner, more contemporarily furnished. Only the view bordered on war-torn. She took his coat and hooked it behind the door alongside others. Her fake fur was absent – did mother and daughter share the same coat?

‘Does Jenna ever hang around with that lot?’ he asked, jerking his thumb back at the snowflakes twisting to earth outside.

Sarah fired him a sideways look. ‘Of course not,’ she almost snapped, indicating the way to the front room.

On the coffee table sat a few weeks-old newspapers, their supplements unthumbed. Patrick got the impression from her dusty CD pile that the genres – indie, sixties rock and roll, lots of greatest hits – represented old tastes. He couldn’t locate his own debut album, which she’d claimed to love. The books dotted about might easily have been Jenna’s GCSE texts – Austen, Brontë, Plath – and he spotted all seven Harry Potters and the Fifty Shades trilogy. The films were either rom-coms, foreign language or starred Audrey Hepburn. A man had never lived in this home.

Patrick noticed some pages of hand-scribbled notation on a table and, following his eyes towards them, Sarah hastily swept the sheets onto a nearby chair, albeit in considered, tidy fashion.

‘Boring, job-related stuff…’ she explained.

From the mantelpiece a young girl smiled down, the traditional school portrait of big teeth in front of a clouded surface. A pink-costumed Barbie beside the photo struck Patrick as an odd memento of Jenna’s childhood, or at least a peculiar place to store it.

A noise from outside, like a violent folding of metal.

‘What was that?’

Patrick drew back a curtain and peered through the whiteness to see the gang in the quadrangle below, uniformly dressed in grey-hooded nonchalance. There were eight – no, nine – of them now, doing nothing, waiting, braving the inclemency. Perhaps it was the sheer fact that they were out, an audacious safety in numbers, that transmitted hostility. One sat upon a bike, smoked a cigarette and kicked at litter from his saddle as though playing some urban game of polo while others sprayed tags on a bin. They still held their makeshift weapons, rapiers for the teenage rulers of the estate. How old were they? Fourteen? Fifteen? When Patrick was their age he was still impressed by kids who could ‘round the world’ their yo-yos. Where were their parents?

Jenna – or the girl who closely resembled her – was nowhere to be seen.

‘Doesn’t this annoy you? The noise?’ One of the group was battering a litter bin with a cricket bat, as though sounding an alarm, or summons.

‘I’m immune now,’ she said. ‘People complain but nothing ever comes of it. The police will only come if something massive happens. I worry about Jenna, of course, but… She stays out of trouble. It’s just how it is round here.’

He stared into the swirling snows. ‘How long have you lived here?’

‘Oh, forever…’

‘It must be difficult…’ he said, taking in the blackened carcasses of an unwanted mattress and sofa, the sulking sky above an asphalt playground that was once brightly painted. ‘I know how draining, financially, emotionally, a separation can be, even when the parties concerned are determined to… Sorry. I didn’t come round to discuss social anthropology, did I?’

But that last question, and its vaguely licentious edge, seemed inappropriate. He doubted Sarah was going to lead him straight to the bedroom, especially after their previous failed tryst, and yet the way she looked at him worried him slightly. There was hunger there. And something else…

‘I mean, what did you want to talk to me about?’ he rephrased.

‘Oh. Nothing. Just wanted to see how you were.’ She took a step into him and he dropped the curtain. ‘I was thinking about you quite a bit over the last few days.’

‘I thought about you too,’ he confessed.

‘Really? What did you think about me? Specifically?’

She’d pressed him against the window, her eyes wide, pleading orbs.

From outside came a terrifying roar, followed by the clash of steel, breaking glass, and he sprang round and tugged back the curtain.

About twenty young people were fighting in the quadrangle, crunching into one another with rugby tackles, bare-knuckled blows. It was an ugly and unprofessional brawl, with little sense of fairness. Here, four on one. There, five against two. Kids used planks, poles, kicked one another as they rolled in the snow, pulled clothes over heads to disorientate. He saw Denis, still with his golf club, swinging it wildly at a group of boys armed with kitchen knives. Patrick wasn’t sure how one side even distinguished themselves from the other. The diplomacy of last summer, when boys played football in their school colours, was long gone.

Lights blinked on all over Bateman block and silhouettes appeared against yellow, floating squares, adults holding themselves back from the glass.

‘Rival gangs sorting out their differences,’ Sarah said, nowhere near as nonplussed as she would have liked to think she sounded.

The sky burst with an explosion. Fiction frequently mixes gunshots and the backfiring of cars but while Patrick hadn’t heard much of either noise in his life he doubted there were many cars backfiring in the pedestrian-only walkway behind Sarah’s flat. It scattered the swarm of youths in all directions, as it did the nesting gulls in the roofs. One boy clutched his shoulder and sank to his knees as the blast echoed throughout the estate. From three stories up, Patrick could make out red spots in the snow.

Too late, the ray-gun wail of sirens began to simmer in the distance and the remaining kids picked themselves up and trudged away. It was all over by the time the blue lights came, swirling the blizzard in all directions. Despite what had looked like significant brutality, no one hung around to get caught by the police, and no bodies remained for transportation into the belly of the ambulance which meandered unwanted into the quadrangle, leaving two snaking trails in its wake. Even the boy who’d collapsed after the gunshot had bled away into some dark alleyway.

In the kids’ place, innocent snow was left rusted and scarred. It took an hour to dig the ambulance’s rear wheels out.

The blue lights flickered one final time across the Monet print tethered to the lounge wall as Sarah served a packet curry. She lit two tall candles which had never had their wicks singed before.

Before it was even on his plate, she asked, ‘You want to stay the night?’ She crossed her legs and her thighs showed all the way to her underwear.

‘We’ll see,’ he said, and what had sounded noncommittal in his head simply came across as teasing. Her invitation, based as much on the brawl having freaked him out as on the snows rendering the estate impassable, could have been platonic.

Sarah shifted the conversation at whim and it was hard to get a foothold. She seemed more nervous than the last time they met and he wondered if it was because of his own obvious unease, or whether – heaven forbid – she’d developed feelings for him. It felt like he was being probed somehow, almost as though she was firing out questions scattergun in the hope that something stuck. The band. No thanks. University. Not today. His marriage. Are you kidding me? An exhaustion he’d rarely felt before fell over him almost as soon as she asked about school.

In the end, she fell back on the easiest subject of them all. If two people in a room both have children, that’s what they end up discussing. Every time.

‘What’s his name?’ she asked.

‘Danny.’

‘Lovely. Named after the boy in The Shining?’

He assumed that had been a joke, until her awaiting expression told him otherwise.

‘No, it was my dad’s name.’

‘Was?’

He took a small photo of his father from his wallet, a suntanned image of him relaxing in Dubrovnik, and passed it across. It had been hard, at first, for Patrick to remember his father as he was in that holiday snap, to push into the background the yellow skin of renal failure, the desperate succession of ‘final’ rattles in his throat as the oxygen left his body, making it seem as though he watched him die a dozen times. Even once time had passed, the overriding emotion that established itself was guilt. Guilt that he hadn’t spent enough time with him. Guilt that he hadn’t spotted how frail he’d become until it was too late, when the only treatment for the untreatable was palliative care and cannulised limbs.

But there was also the guilt at the relief he felt that his father was no longer there to ignore him. Guilt at the bitterness that struck him when he recalled the efforts to gain his father’s affection, only for it to fall on tone-deaf ears. Naming his son after the man hadn’t been his idea – in fact, it had been everyone’s idea but his, mooted because it felt ‘right’ at a time when the pregnancy was public knowledge and his father still clung to this accident we call life – but he’d gone along with it. Now that his father was smoke, he had to admit to himself that he’d allowed his son to be called Danny for one reason only: it was a final, desperate attempt to seek a scrap of attention from his old man.

‘He died four weeks after our son was born. Cancer.’

She scrutinised the image. ‘I’m sorry.’

They ate in silence for a bit.

‘You got any photos of Danny?’

Patrick moved his chair closer to her, took out his phone and showed him image after image of his son’s visit at Christmas.

‘These are recent?’ she asked, surprised.

He explained about Ana’s visit. ‘They’re funny at that age, aren’t they? Just about everything they do is brilliant. But you have to treat the things they say as gold dust, as the most important things in the world, because to them they are, and you don’t want them to stop telling you that stuff. I mean, two is a nightmare. They’re famously difficult at that age. But three… Three is… I just…’ He didn’t go on. He couldn’t.

Patrick pushed his chair back round the other side and resumed his meal. He felt her watching him for a while but she didn’t say anything, her fork stirring her rice in slow, irregular circles.

‘Shall we go to the sofa?’ she asked, once he’d finished. Something in her voice told him she was no longer nervous. Maybe she’d prised what she wanted from him already.

Though they sat with barely a foot gap between them, he got the impression she bottled further sexual invitations. She eventually pulled her bare legs up next to her, a large glass of wine cradled in her lap, and eyed him drowsily.

‘You love your son very much.’

‘Of course. I’m programmed that way.’

‘Well, you say that, but I know of men – well, I use the term “men” – who felt nothing, soon as they saw their children, but the urge to run away.’

Patrick watched the chip of cork floating in his wine for a time. ‘I do love him, but… In a way, that doesn’t come close to describing it. I would literally put my life on the line if it meant protecting him from anything so much as a scratch. And yet, when the three of us were living together, there were times when I found his presence unbearable.’ He fished the offending object from his drink. ‘I mean, it’s hard, isn’t it? It’s exhausting. And I, quite unreasonably, somehow blamed him for my life being ushered along a different path. Maybe the breakdown of our relationship put a strain on my love for my son. Or maybe the strain of my love for my son broke our marriage. I don’t know. All I know is that I miss him so much… I never thought I would feel such a, a rift. My father – and this will sound awful – I miss far less, even though he was in my life much longer. I think it’s the ownership thing. You invest in the things you create. But he’ll fall from me, as I fell from my father. I wonder, too, about his age… My first memories stem from the days when I was the age he is now. Will he even remember living in England? Will his first memory be of his father leaving him? Because that’s what it will seem like. I hope, one day, he’ll realise that it wasn’t my choice, that it was she who took him from me…’

It was with eyes itching with tears that he turned to see Sarah slackjawed and snoring beside him.

He finished off the wine, then helped himself to hers. There was a third left in the bottle and he had that too. He would make his way home soon, despite the snow and the violence outside. She’d probably be hurt in the morning, but he felt unashamedly wounded that she’d fallen asleep during that speech.

The journey back would be cold and slow-going but it didn’t matter. Highfields would be closed again tomorrow, due to the risks involved with pupils travelling. It was depressing how happy this notion made him.

He lay back and closed his eyes, just for a moment.

He woke under a blanket in pretty much the same position. His left arm had gone to sleep, hanging off the sofa, and Sarah was gone.

Then he heard the voices.

Even if his senses hadn’t been heightened by the bloodshed he’d witnessed earlier, he would still have discerned the murmuring from one of the bedrooms. He assumed it was Jenna, home again and on her phone, but then an urgent but quiet male voice could be heard in reply. He lay in the dark and strained to hear more.

The murmurs from the neighbouring room carried on for two minutes before Patrick eventually let his curiosity steal him into the hallway, where a thin strip of yellow glowed under a door.

The voices stopped again.

In a brief moment of awareness, he saw what he must have looked like, lurking in the dark outside what was, in all probability, the bedroom of one of his female students. But curiosity got the better of him, and, soundlessly, he crouched forward and placed his eye to the girl’s keyhole.

She was on her knees, still wearing her mother’s coat. There was no sign of anyone else in the room. Patrick watched as she wriggled herself back out from under the bed, empty-handed, and slunk towards the door.

He snatched his eye away and bolted to one side and, as Jenna’s bulb was extinguished and his bearings became misplaced, he kicked open another door by accident, slamming it back against something solid.

A bedside light snapped on and Sarah shot up in bed.

‘What the…?’

He stood in her doorway, fumbling for an excuse. ‘I couldn’t sleep. I was looking for the bathroom.’

She eyed him in sleepy terror.

‘I wasn’t spying on anyone. I was in the living room, watching the foxes from the window. Then I went looking for the toilet. That’s all I was doing.’

‘Patrick, why are you whispering? It’s just us.’ He caught the icy tone of distrust in her voice.

‘Right. Sorry.’

‘Don’t let them kids get to you.’ She tossed a rattling box towards him across the bed. ‘Sleeping pills. They might help.’

Patrick inspected the packet of sedatives and saw they promised to stimulate more of a coma than sleep. Sarah blearily indicated the near side of the bed, patted it down to indicate he could join her, and he sat in heavy silence.

‘They don’t seem to have helped you,’ he said.

‘A rock star kicked my bedroom door down.’

After that, there was nothing else to do but kiss. It took several minutes this time before she pulled away and he recognised the same crestfallen, guilty look that he’d received at the hotel. He lay back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling and when he heard a soft snuffling from her side of the bed dismissed it as a ghosted echo of the last weeks of his marriage. It was too soon for tears.

But when she moved in closer to him, he found a face wet with them.

‘Bollocks,’ she hissed, softly. ‘This is the last thing you want, isn’t it?’

‘What’s the matter?’

She dragged herself up a little in the bed, smeared a hand across her face. ‘I’m sorry. This is part of it, I’m afraid.’

He sat up too. ‘Part of…?’

‘Mike couldn’t take it in the end. Few couples, statistically, survive the death of…’

She didn’t finish, but Patrick worked it out, and as he did so knew the stiffening of his torso gave his astonishment away. She’d spoken as though he had foreknowledge of her bereavement. Maybe she assumed, as Jenna’s teacher, he was already privy to this information.

After a few minutes, Sarah wormed free of his shoulder, snatched a handful of tissues from a box by the bed, and blew her nose. ‘I need to know you’re for real,’ she said. ‘I need to know… you’re with me because you want to be. Am I making any sense?’

‘I’m for real.’ He tried to sound as reassuring as possible, despite the inner voice gnawing at him. Was he for real? What did that even mean? A nerve in his eye was twitching.

‘I’m trying to deal with it but… My psychiatrist suggested I write down how I feel, so I don’t bottle it all up.’ Patrick recalled the pages of notes scattered across the table in the front room. ‘I don’t think it’s working, do you?’

‘What was her name?’ he asked.

Sarah looked at him, her eyes vivid. She either laughed or sobbed as her hands wrung at the duvet, and she forced herself to take deep breaths which stuttered on their journey from her lungs. ‘Millie.’

‘Is that her photo on the lounge mantelpiece?’

She nodded.

The archaeology of her unhappiness revealed, Patrick scrabbled over clichéd words of apology. So inadequate were his attempts, she asked him to stop and the pair sat there for a long time, staring blindly into the converging vanishing points of the past and present. After the evening’s rampage, it seemed unnaturally quiet outside. He could have punched himself in the head, there and then, for going on and on about Danny all evening.

‘Your turn,’ she said.

‘My what?’

Sarah’s grin appeared theatrical in its intensity as she pressed his shoulder. ‘We’ve told each other so little about ourselves. You must have had your heart broken at some point. Everybody has.’

He sank down into the bed. Not only did a swapping of bereavements strike him as crude but his past had never felt so redundant. ‘Seriously. I don’t… Nothing worth telling.’ He attempted a placatory smile. A humidifier hummed through a circle of corrugated plastic on the wall.

Sarah turned and snapped off the bedside lamp. ‘Fair enough,’ she said, bedding herself back into the sheets with her back to him.

Patrick, horribly aware of Sarah’s wakefulness, could only chase the same questions around his head. Who was in Jenna’s room earlier and where had he suddenly disappeared to? What had she been hiding under her bed? Why was she hanging out with Denis, the boy who’d molested her?

Since Sarah was no longer on speaking terms with her ex-husband, Jenna could claim to be waltzing off to her father’s whenever the need arose. It was the perfect scenario if she felt the need to hang out with questionable friends.

Or gang members.

Patrick turned and, without thinking, draped his arm over Sarah’s hip. Perhaps just as involuntarily, she reached down and threaded her fingers through his.

‘Compared to your life story, mine’s nowhere near as… dramatic.’ The wrong word.

‘Go on.’

She was clearly as intrigued, as intimidated, by his past life as he was by hers, yet he had but a small reservoir of hurt, compared to Sarah, from which to draw his confessional. His wife’s suitcase in the hallway. Cold hands unfurling, dissolving his aloof father into death alongside his cancer. His little boy, waving obliviously from the back of a taxi bound for Heathrow. Only his most painful experiences would make the grade here, and he silently thanked her for the opportunity to exorcise a demon.

‘The band had been my identity for a long time,’ he said, pressed against her. Pale streetlight smudged the room. It was an unhealthy, yellow hue. ‘My entire identity… When it broke up… I didn’t take it well. But I still had Ana. Then she and I, in the time-honoured way, drifted apart… Or maybe I pushed her away…’

‘I remember something about…’

‘Ana had been Adam’s girlfriend. Adam was our singer. I stole her off him, in short.’

‘You cad.’ Sarah was only trying to gee him on but had managed to decorate the story as a humorous one before he’d even begun.

‘I broke up the band for the love of a woman. I continued to gig for a while, solo stuff, wrote a few songs for other people, then, when Ana and I got married and started talking about the possibility of a family, I started teaching, for security really, always thinking I could session here and there. When Ana left me, it felt like losing the band all over again. What had that sacrifice been for? I resented her for that, for doing to me what she’d once done to Adam.’

‘He was so good-looking…’ Sarah cooed in the dark. ‘As were you,’ she quickly added. ‘As are you.’

‘Everyone fancied Adam, which is why certain magazines were so shocked when she left him for me. The Forsaken may or may not have gone supersonic anyway, who knows? And I still have my memories of that period in my life…’ But Patrick seldom bothered to remember the happier times. His pride in his achievements was usurped by the poisoning knowledge that his band mates – men who should, at the very least, have been drinking partners for life – blamed him for the smoking ruins of their music careers. ‘All my ambition had been for nothing. To keep myself from the pain of it all, I embraced the change of direction; giving up music completely seemed strangely appealing, though I now consider that to have been nothing more than a form of sulking. Lately… I don’t know. Failure doesn’t feel good. I arrive home totally knackered. I can’t write songs any more, or I’ve got no time to. I see these young, hip indie guys making music for a living and… it burns me. ’

‘I don’t think you’ve failed.’ The bedside light scalded his eyes and Sarah crossed to a silver, balloon-shaped CD player in the corner of the bedroom. ‘I thought I’d failed as a mother but… Look, sometimes you think you’re on the wrong track, but all regret does is speed you past stations you’ve never heard of.’ This sounded like her psychotherapy talking. ‘Sadly, you can’t always get off and board another train.’ She held up a CD case. An album cover showed four men, fresh-faced and long-haired. Two members of this quartet, including a face that barely resembled Patrick Owen’s any longer, looked moodily to the left while the other two stared at the camera. They all wore black and the photo, as befitting the contemplative poses, was shot in monochrome. Behind them, the hopeful, arrogant vista of London, full of promise.

She wasn’t embarrassed to admit she’d been listening to his work. She wanted him to see the album, just as she’d obviously wanted him to spot her therapy notes earlier. She wanted him to see her as she was, and he felt his heart dance a little closer towards something that could, perhaps, one day, be love.

He recalled the reviews of this, their first album. ‘One of the better bands from the current crop,’ a reporter in the know had begun. ‘Undoubted talent,’ heralded another. ‘Cuts a swathe into the zeitgeist.’ But no one bought their second album of doubtful, murky compositions, avant-garde melodies forged in the inferno of his and Ana’s adultery.

‘Please don’t put it on,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘What would you say if they wanted to give it another go?’

Ana’s betrayals fermenting anew within his mind, Patrick’s reply was instant. ‘I’d tell her to get lost.’

‘I meant the band.’

‘Oh.’ Patrick slumped into the recess Sarah left in her pillow. He contemplated the brutal monotony of his teaching career, squaring it alongside the day The Forsaken played Glastonbury and Iggy Pop asked him for a cigarette backstage. ‘I think I’d rejoin, yeah.’

Sarah smiled and slipped back into bed, then curled herself up, somewhat defensively.

‘Night, Patrick.’

At that moment, he knew he’d wait until Sarah’s snoring insulted his insomnia before scribbling out his note of apology and leaving it on her bedside. He knew the night busses wouldn’t be running and a long, freezing trudge back home under a pale, cartridge paper sky awaited him. But, right then, despite his growing feelings for this woman, and the deepening mysteries surrounding her daughter, he wanted nothing more than to sleep fitfully in his son’s unmade bed with the neighbour’s violin playing a hymnal and the certainty of snow shutting Highfields.

He’d stick to the shadows on the way home, and pray Denis was sleeping too.