When they eventually left the hospital Tamara was crying. She’d tried to stop. She knew it got on Crackle’s nerves. She could see by the way his cheekbones moved that he was upset himself, but his eyes were dry. She’d tried to take his hand, but he’d slapped her off. His silence terrified her. They went into a telephone box and she rang for a taxi, but snow had started falling again, and the man on the end of the phone said that they would have to wait forty minutes. When she’d told Crackle he had said, “Fuck that,” stomped out of the telephone box and headed towards the city centre. She hadn’t dared to follow him, but had watched his hunched figure until he’d turned the corner at the top of the street.
Earlier on in the café she’d given him all the money she had. She waited, shivering, inside the box until the taxi came over an hour later. She gave the driver an address which wasn’t hers, but which was round the corner from where she lived. As they drew near to the false destination, she stealthily opened the door of the car and leapt out, before it had come to a complete standstill. As she darted across the road and ran up an alley between two rows of houses, she heard the driver’s shout of rage as he watched his fare disappear into the night.
She opened the back garden gate of a house and crouched down in the darkness by the shed wall. She listened to the sound of the taxi as it drove around the block, then hearing the engine accelerate and die away, she crept out of the garden and walked the long way round to the flat. The phone started ringing as she turned the key to the front door. She ran into the living room and snatched it up, expecting it to be somebody from the hospital telling her that Storme was dead. But it was Crackle asking her to find her benefit book, and get a taxi and take it to Rita’s crack house where he’d been refused credit. She could hear music in the background and raucous laughter.
“I can’t, I feel poorly,” she said, and it was true. She felt as though her body was full of poison. All she wanted to do was to lie down and rest. He was incredulous. He screamed at her, causing his voice to rise in pitch like that of a woman.
“Bring it now. I need it! Bring it now!”
“I’ve got to stay here, in case the hospital ring,” she pleaded.
“I’ll kill you,” he screamed. “I’ll fucking mark your face.”
She put the phone down on him, then fetched the red coat, pulled it around her and lay down on the sofa. She dare not go to bed, and it was true that she couldn’t bear to leave the phone. Eventually sleep overcame her.
♦
She heard him stumble in. It was still dark. She braced herself for a beating, hiding her face with her hands and pulling her legs up so that her knees were pressed against her breasts. But he passed down the hallway and went into the bedroom. She heard him undressing and getting into bed. She waited, alive to every sound, until she heard the snores that told her that he was asleep. Only then did she uncoil her body and allow herself to drift off again into a troubled dream world.
In the morning Tamara got up from the sofa and went to the phone to find that it had now been disconnected, as British Telecom had threatened. Pausing only to grab her make-up bag from the bathroom, she left the flat before Crackle woke up and started on her.
She hurried as fast as she could through the snow, slithering in the only dry footwear she’d got, the black cowboy boots with the worn-down heels. Her dad lived less than a mile away on the same estate, but the snow turned the journey into an exhausting epic. Tamara felt like a fugitive, she half-expected Crackle’s face to appear in the sky, and his voice to order her back.
Tamara’s father, Ken, checked to see who it was at his front door at 8.30 AM in the morning by peering down from the bedroom window upstairs. It was many years since he’d been able to open the door without hesitation. There was always some bugger at the door asking for money. He’d tried to keep out of debt, but as soon as he got clear something else happened to knock him back—like finding the money for Cath’s headstone.
He didn’t look pleased to see Tamara. She always brought trouble with her. If it was money she wanted, he’d give her a fiver and no more.
Ken said, “What’s up now?” They were a family who didn’t bother with greetings or goodbyes.
“Storme’s in the hospital.” Tamara dreaded the inevitable next question.
“What’s up with her?”
Brandy, the fat Labrador, sniffed at Tamara’s crotch. She pushed him away.
“She fell out of her cot. She’s got a fractured skull and they’ve took her spleen out.”
Ken fumbled in the pocket of his burgundy towelling dressing gown for his cigarettes and lighter, and went into the kitchen and picked up the mug of tea he’d been drinking when Tamara had knocked at the door. The Daily Mirror was propped against the sugar bowl, it was open at a picture spread of the Spice Girls. The kitchen was as clean and neat as it had always been when her mother had been alive. He sat down heavily on a mock pine chair and raked back his thinning brown hair with his fingers. Tamara looked at him and wondered when it was he had got so old.
“Our phone’s been cut off. Can I ring and ask how she is?”
Ken gestured wearily towards the wall phone in the kitchen. It was one bleddy thing after another, he thought. When would it end? His body felt heavy and he was reluctant to get off the chair and go upstairs and get dressed.
“Poor little bugger,” he said. “I’ll get myself sorted and we’ll go and see her.”
Tamara was speaking to directory enquiries, asking for the number of the hospital. “Tamara!” shouted Ken. “Don’t phone bleddy enquiries at over a quid a shot. It’s up there, on the wall!”
A year ago when Cath was alive, he had neatly written out a list of the telephone numbers they used the most and pinned it to the cork noticeboard next to the telephone. Since then the words ‘Cath’s work’ had had three lines drawn through them. He had used the edge of a cigarette packet as a ruler to ensure that the lines were absolutely straight. Cath should be here, he thought. She was needed. She always knew what to do. Why hadn’t God taken that pile of shit, Crackle, instead? Ken had banned Crackle from the house since that hot day when he had taken his t-shirt off in the back garden and Ken had seen that the scumbag had paid good money to have ‘Satan’ tattooed in inch-high letters across his shoulders.
Ken and Cath were Christians and had braved the derision of their family and friends and fellow council tenants and had gone to morning service on Sundays at the concrete Anglican church that looked like a fire station. The congregation struggled to reach double figures. Ken had stopped going to church, after Cath’s funeral. He hadn’t wanted to be told by the deaconess who conducted the service that Cath had been born and had died in sin. If it was true, then what was the point of living? He prayed on his own now. After he’d turned the television off at night.
Tamara put the phone down and said, “They say she’s still very poorly.”
They had to push the Volkswagen Golf to get it started. A man sweeping snow from his path came to help them. Love thy neighbour, thought Ken. He was glad he had resisted having a tot of whisky in his tea. God must have known he’d need to drive the car and have a clear head.
When they’d parked the car and were walking across the gritted hospital carpark, Ken pressed Tamara for more details about the accident. He knew from the familiar way that her index finger flew to her mouth that she was lying to him.
When he spoke to Mr Parker-Wright an hour later, he knew for certain who had harmed his little granddaughter.
He felt as if his head would explode with anger. He was not a violent man, but there and then he vowed to kill Crackle. He would do it himself. You couldn’t trust God to mete out the proper punishment to Satan’s disciples. Not nowadays. God had gone soft on crime.