I woke so suddenly that I didn’t know where I was. What the hell—? Then came another scream, from my spare room. Andy!
I was in his room, switching on the light, before I realised I was on my feet.
‘It’s all right, love. It’s only one of your dreams. Come on – wake up!’ I sat on the bed, shaking him gently, as I’d done so often when we were children.
At last he woke. He grabbed me convulsively. ‘Ruth?’
‘No, love, it’s me. Sophie. You’ve been having one of your nightmares. Wake up, now.’
He pulled himself into my arms; I pressed his head to my chest, as if we were six again. ‘What was all that about?’ But I knew, didn’t I? ‘How about a cup of tea?’
He was swinging himself out of bed before we realised he’d been sleeping in the nude.
‘Hang on! I’ll get you my dressing-gown.’
It was a unisex towelling affair, a little long for me, and he always used it when he came so he could travel light – an overnight case held all he needed. He was, however, the only visitor I had who always brought his own rubber gloves so he could wash up.
‘Jesus,’ he said, wrapping my dressing-gown round him.
‘Tea? Or cocoa, or whiskey?’ I asked. ‘Here or downstairs?’
He shuddered. ‘Cocoa. Downstairs. Christ!’
Fortunately I’d enough milk for cocoa, and I doubled his usual intake of sugar. And, on second thoughts, mine. His hands were still shaking when he wrapped them round the mug. It was his favourite, with a transfer of a Ferrari on the front; it reminded him of the shiny red one he’d written off fifteen years ago.
‘You’d better tell me all about it,’ I said, sitting next to him at the kitchen table. ‘I know something’s up.’
‘You always did.’ He didn’t move, though, still clutching the cocoa mug with both hands; the dressing-gown sleeves, far too short, rode up his forearms. ‘You haven’t got any of your home-made jam, have you?’ He got up to rummage in the usual cupboard, but had to make a grab for decency. ‘Tell you what, I’ll go and put some knickers on and get you your duvet. That nightie looks horribly like winceyette but you’ll still need something.’
‘I dress for warmth and chastity these days,’ I said, lightly.
The clocks on the cooker, the microwave and the ghetto-blaster told me it was four-twenty-three. Good job it was Saturday – I had a terrible feeling I wasn’t going to get much sleep this particular night. I switched on the central heating: we might as well be miserable in comfort. Then I made thick toast, found the jam. I reached out honey too, just in case.
He came back, wearing remarkably cheery striped socks, and thrust a similar pair at me: I put them on, and wrapped myself in the duvet he’d brought down. Then he produced an envelope from the dressing-gown pocket and spread in front of me a set of colour photos. I rubbed the last of the bleariness from my eyes and looked. Andy’s BMW, with a scar on the bonnet as if a child had scribbled on a blackboard; Ruth’s new Mercedes, open-top and in the sky-blue of a Corgi model, with a spray of white lilies on its bonnet. Not at all cheery.
‘That’s what worries me,’ he said, pointing at the funeral flowers.
‘The whole thing worries me,’ I said. ‘Have you read any newspapers recently?’
He counted them off on his fingers, as if humouring me: the Guardian, Irish Times, Independent.
‘Not the Evening Mail?’
He looked at me sharply. ‘OK – tell me.’
I told him.
We sat in silence, our hands clasped. At last he pushed away, and sought the comfort of jam and butter, spreading them thickly on the toast. ‘Fuck the diet,’ he said, as if I’d protested.
‘What have you done about this so far?’ I asked. ‘Apart from the police?’
‘Not the police.’
‘Not the – you’re joking!’
‘Private investigator. I want it all kept confidential.’
‘You must be off your head!’
He looked away, irritated. Then he turned back. ‘I want to do this job for UNICEF more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. It’s important. I want to do it now, while the punters remember me, and I don’t want anything to stop me. Anything.’ He pushed himself to his feet and stalked to the far end of the kitchen, forgetting that it’s hard to look dignified in an undersized towelling bath-robe. Especially when you’re wearing stripey socks.
My desire to laugh was extinguished by what I had to say. ‘There’s one thing’ll stop you. And that’s what this lot is threatening you with.’
‘There’s a bodyguard with me all the time.’
I searched ostentatiously under the table.
‘In an Espace, parked outside. Tailed my taxi from the airport. And I’ll be safe enough at the Music Centre – the roadies have all toured with me for years.’
‘What about the local team?’
‘They’ll only be using people I’ve worked with before.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘With all the activity erecting the set, Attila the Hun could get in and no one’d notice.’
‘Passes.’
‘Passes, schmasses. You can’t tell me all those odds and sods who float around have passes.’
‘They do this time. Special liggers’ passes. Actually says “ligger” on it. And,’ he added triumphantly, ‘it’s not just a pass they need, but the right colour cord round their neck.’
‘Ligatures,’ I said, grimacing at my own pun.
‘Different colour neck-cords for each type of pass, the colour combination known only on the day and decided at random.’
I wrinkled my nose. A statistic about the number of murder victims who knew and trusted their murderers was niggling somewhere in the recesses of my mind.
‘Still think you ought to tell the police. Chris, for instance – he’d know what to do.’
‘It’s not unknown,’ he said, ‘for people under police protection to be attacked. Is it?’
‘Point taken. All the same—’
‘Tell you what, we’ll argue about it in the morning. Night, love.’ He kissed me absently on the cheek and went back to bed.
I met him again an hour later, trying to sneak downstairs without waking me. At the time I was trying to sneak downstairs without waking him. We plodded in silence back to the kitchen.
‘What do you do when you can’t sleep?’ he asked.
‘Clean out a drawer,’ I said.
‘What?’ His face was so appalled it was comical.
‘Clean out a drawer. There was this man at college had the most appalling insomnia – tried everything the National Health could suggest and then some. Anyway, he fetched up with a hypnotherapist, expecting a swinging watch before the eyes. But he didn’t get it. He got forty quids’ worth of advice, though. The therapist asked what he hated most. Cleaning the kitchen floor, he said. Right, said the therapist, that’s what you’ll do tonight when you can’t sleep. And tomorrow. And the night after. Carl couldn’t believe his ears. I usually have a milky drink and read, he said. Quite, said the therapist. And you don’t sleep. You’re rewarding yourself for not sleeping. This way you’ll sleep. It may take a week, if you’re a slow learner.’
Andy was grinning at last. ‘How long did it take?’
‘Three nights. Now, I don’t mind kitchen floors, but I hate drawers.’
‘Better fetch my rubber gloves,’ he said, emptying the cutlery drawer into the sink.
‘I can’t think,’ I said, greeting him at eleven with a light kiss, ‘of a nicer way to be woken than by the smell of bacon.’
He raised a disbelieving eyebrow.
‘OK. Not many nicer ways.’ Chris believed in alarm clocks, and early-morning exercises. He considered sex something you did before you went to sleep, and when I’d once tried to alleviate some dawn boredom he’d had a tantrum but no erection. I sighed at the memory.
Not too surprisingly, Andy made the connection. ‘Is Chris coming to the gig? You’d rather he didn’t? Think he’d disapprove?’
Chris and Andy had never met face to face. They’d spoken on the phone a couple of times, when Chris had happened to answer it for me, but neither had seemed particularly keen to take things further. Andy had heard a lot about Chris, however, seeming to have an uncanny knack of phoning whenever the offs of our relationship outweighed the ons.
‘I don’t know is the answer. To all of your questions. He’s safely at Bramshill at the moment, busily male-bonding. Poor chap,’ I added, ‘he must hate it. He’s distinctly unclubbable.’
‘Drop him. Come on, you’re how old?’
‘Nine months older than you, pillock!’
‘Thirty-six. I’d have thought your biological clock was ticking quite loudly by now. Aren’t you leaving it a bit late?’
‘For children, you mean? Lots of women leave it later than this.’
‘You’re not lots of women.’
I waited while he turned the bacon – apparently he was out of vegetarian mode already – and broke an egg into the frying pan. ‘I know. And I don’t seem to have the instincts of lots of women. OK, there was a bad year when I was about thirty, when I’d have loved a baby. But these days it just doesn’t seem to worry me. All those students I teach – perhaps it’s sublimation,’ I added, not altogether joking.
‘It’s not just kids, though,’ he said, ‘Ruth and I – we can’t. Nor the sex. It’s the cuddle in the middle of the night, the person next to you that you can reach out and touch.’
It was having someone to hold when you had a nightmare.
Ruth.
I dug in the fridge for the bread.
‘The trouble is,’ he said, flipping the egg on to a plate and breaking another one into the pan, ‘that being in a second-best relationship can stop you getting into the right one.’
‘There isn’t a right one on the horizon at the moment,’ I said, angry that I was letting the bleakness show. ‘And I have a penchant as great as yours for falling for the wrong person. At least Chris keeps me on the straight and narrow.’
‘In that case you definitely ought to drop him. Tell you what – come down to Devon at Easter. I’ll parade all the eligible young men I know before you.’
‘Knowing your friends,’ I said, ‘that’ll take all of two minutes.’