Every Woman Knows a Secret

Sock was a source of delight to everyone. For Jess the sight and smell and feel of him, the round head and peachy fuzz of skin, brought back piercingly sharp memories of her own babies. She turned her head to look at their photographs, framed on the shelf beside her chair. To see Sock was almost to have them back again.

‘He’s learnt so many new words.’

‘What does he say?’

They could talk endlessly about his achievements. There were no complications in this.

‘James is looking after him for the whole day tomorrow. I’m going to London to do the handcream voice-over. I’m swimming in free handouts of the stuff here, do you want some?’

‘Handcream? Yes, can you take it intravenously?’

‘Probably. I just hope they don’t expect me to say so in thirty seconds. Darling, I’ve got to go.’

James reappeared, changed out of his business clothes into a sweater and corduroys. He made a little tilting movement with his fingers, asking if she wanted a drink. Lizzie mouthed, ‘God, yes.’

‘Right. Hope the voice-over goes well. Call me soon.’

‘Tomorrow night, or the day after. Promise you’re all right?’

‘Everything is fine here.’

‘Good night darling.’

James came to her as she put down the phone and slid his hands down to her hips, then kissed her thoroughly.

‘Mmm. At last. How are you, my darling?’

She curled an arm around his neck. ‘Feeling pretty fat and mumsy, actually.’

‘You look wonderful. You feel wonderful.’

‘Oh. Ah. Jim, what did my life consist of before there was you?’

Jess went slowly upstairs to the bathroom and tipped a heap of soiled clothes out of a basket. She stooped to sort them into differentiated piles and carried an armful down to the kitchen. She fed the bundle into the washing machine and slammed the round eye of the door, and while the clothes turned in the lace of suds she found a tin of soup in the cupboard and heated it up. She carried the bowl through into the living room and watched the television news as she ate.

The club was packed. It was a popular DJ night and there were surges of dancers filling the floor. In the mass of people Rob could see Danny dancing with Cat. He was smiling broadly and bouncing on the spot, up and down fast from the knees, as if he was on springs. One hand held a bottle by the neck and the other waved in the air over his head. The four girls and Rob and Danny had all had a lot to drink, the celebration of Zoe’s birthday moving on from the café to gather swift momentum in another pub and then the club. The beginning of the day seemed very long ago to Rob, at the far end of a multicoloured narrow tunnel. The music was loud, seeming to generate itself within his head. He followed the intricate cross-patterning of it in his mind, letting his eyes drift shut, then opening them again to see Cat standing in front of him. She was very pretty, he noticed for the first time. A little triangular face, just like a cat’s, with a damp fringe of hair sticking to her forehead. Smoky eyes. He knew from dancing with her that she was thin and light-boned. Catty-like. He swayed towards her with music booming in his head. She was saying something to him.

‘What?’

She repeated it, shouting with her mouth to his ear. Warm breath on his face. ‘Where’s Rachel?’

Rachel. Yes, the plain one of the foursome. She had been here a minute or perhaps an hour ago. He shrugged his shoulders against the waves of sound and Cat pushed away from him. Danny was at the bar now and Rob joined him. Another beer apiece, and when Danny tilted the bottle to his mouth a trail of silvery froth ran down his chin and glittered in the blue and purple lights. He wiped it away and moved his head to draw Rob closer. They stumbled together, Rob’s arm round Dan’s shoulders, a support for both of them.

‘Not a bad night.’ Dan was grinning, the angle of the lights making him seem cross-eyed.

‘Yeah, pretty good.’

‘Listen. I’m going back with her.’

‘With who?’

‘Cat.’

‘Shit. I quite fancied her myself.’

Danny’s grin widened. ‘No chance, my son. I’m in there.’

‘Who’s driving, then?’ Rob’s old van was parked outside. After the pub they had all piled into it, the girls’ legs and buttocks heaving and pressing in the passenger seat. Rob remembered laughing and gunning the clapped-out engine, and the traffic lights on sentry duty down a long stretch of wet road to the club warehouse.

‘We’ll get a cab or something,’ Dan said vaguely, his smile beatific, irritating.

‘Sod you then.’ A prickle of antagonism renewed itself between them.

‘What about what’s-her-name, Zoe?’

‘Thanks.’

Cat came back. She had pushed her hair off her face and her round forehead looked bare and vulnerable.

‘Rachel’s in the toilets. She’s not very well.’

Danny took another pull on his beer.

‘What’s happening then?’

‘We’re going to take her home.’

‘All of you? What is she, crippled?’

Cat hesitated. Her top lip crimped, making a new triangle in the inverted one of her face. ‘Wait a minute, then.’

There was beer spilt on the bar, and a slick of it underfoot. The crowd standing three deep was now dotted with familiar faces, and the sweating barman in his soaked T-shirt was a regular at the gym. The gathering seemed suddenly tribal and this and the women’s invisible crisis tipped the boys back into collusion. They turned their backs on the heaving dance floor and the barman saw them and sent two uncapped bottle slithering across. Dan clashed his against Rob’s and they drank, leaning their heads back. The blue and purple lights recoloured Rob’s sweat-darkened hair. Standing shoulder to shoulder while the surf of people and music crashed around them, they had almost forgotten Cat before she materialised again, with Zoe beside her.

‘The other two have gone.’

Danny took hold of her wrist, his feral grin showing his teeth. ‘C’mon then. We’ll drive you girls home.’

The rain had thinned into drizzle once more. In the front of the van Cat sat across Danny’s knees but her arm and shoulder and thigh were wedged against Rob. Zoe crouched in the space behind, her chin over Danny’s shoulder. They were not singing or laughing any longer. Rob peered ahead, frowning through the hypnotising arcs of the wipers. The cab of the van vibrated with engine noise, but on a different frequency each of them plainly heard the ambiguous whisper of sex.

Jess washed up her soup pan and placed her bowl and spoon in the proper slots in the dishwasher. In the hallway she glanced at the security chain for the front door hanging loose from its bolts. She checked her watch and hesitated for a minute as a dark wing of anxiety shadowed her thoughts. Then she went slowly upstairs, leaving the door unsecured. Her bedroom and the inviting bed were as she had left them. She sat on the edge of the bed and wearily reached down to undo her shoes.

Cat’s place was a rented room in a rambling mouldy-smelling house near the railway line. While Rob and Danny were waiting on the step for her to rummage for her keys they heard the muffled rumble of a goods train passing. Rob thought of heavy flasks of nuclear waste being transported from somewhere to somewhere in the midnight dark, and shivered as if a cold hand had been laid on him.

‘There isn’t much to drink. Some vodka I think, if you want that. Someone left it here.’

Cat produced a half-empty bottle from a partitioned sink cupboard.

‘I’ll have some,’ Rob said. They had begun laughing again. The two boys stumbling in the cluttered room seemed incongruous, comically out of scale. Zoe peered at her pale reflection in her handbag mirror and stretched her mouth ready to coat it with lipstick. Her hand slipped with the cylinder and slashed scarlet across her teeth instead. Her helpless giggle turned into a hiccup.

Cat gave each of them a green glass with an inch of vodka in it. Danny took his and immediately put it aside, losing it. Cat slid a tape into a cassette player and music blurted out, much too loud. She laughed and prodded at the controls, then collapsed backwards on the bed beside her friend.

Danny mumbled, ‘I’ll roll a spliff.’ He sat sideways at a tiny table and produced the pouch from his pocket, humming as he spread the papers.

Then they sat on the bed, one on either side of the girls, passing the clumsy roll-up between them. Cat’s black legs sprawled impartially. Danny touched the curve of her thigh with the tips of his fingers and began to stroke, lightly, then more insistently.

He drew in a breath and held it. Then, abruptly, he lurched to his feet.

The room was spinning around him but he didn’t care. There was a wash of light inside his head, golden light filled with stars that prickled within his brain in the way that not very long ago a certain type of sweets had been made to fizz on his tongue. It was impossible to contain this feeling of power, which was what the light was; he had to let it burst out. He could feel the wild breadth of his own smile. He was dry-mouthed and his gums squeaked against his teeth. He looked down at Cat to see her staring up at him, amazed. Zoe’s eyes were closed, her head lolling on Rob’s shoulder.

Danny flung out his arm. To his surprise, his fingers were still nipped on the roll-up. Tiny sparks smouldered for an instant in the air. He had been going to say something important but he had already forgotten it. No matter. He knelt down at Cat’s feet instead. She leaned forward slowly until their foreheads were touching. Then she lightly kissed his mouth, but her fingers locked warningly in his black hair.

Danny breathed, ‘I love you.’

Cat made a little bubble of a laugh. ‘I know what that means; I’ve heard it all before.’

‘No, no, it isn’t that. I do. I really do.’

‘Yeah, course you do.’

Her flippancy irritated him. He took her chin in his hand, twisting her head a little. The golden light in his head faded to dull, pounding redness.

‘C’mon. Be nice.’

‘You’re hurting me.’

‘You like it.’

‘I don’t. Stop.’

He pushed her backwards, reaching his hand up her skirt.

‘Don’t cocktease. Isn’t this why we’re here? Look, I love you. I mean it.’

‘I mean it.’ Cat was suddenly breathless. The changed note in her voice made Zoe’s eyes snap open.

Rob was afraid of violence. The sight and most of all the sounds of it set waves of panic and terror washing through him. The way that it could erupt out of nowhere as it did now, sudden and hideously defined from the muzzy bonhomie of drink, froze the breath in his lungs and stiffened his limbs into immobility. In the minutes that followed he wanted to shrink and hide, but he made himself act. He felt small and clumsy, but his reactions were quick, as he had learned to make them.

*

The cold air outside hit Rob in the face. He couldn’t quite remember where he had left the van. Danny leaned dazedly against some railings next to the dustbins, rubbing his mouth.

Rob yelled at him. ‘You fucking loser. Bloody come on, will you?’

Rob began to run and after a second Danny thumped in his wake. Far worse demons chased after Rob; images of violence gathered force behind him and loomed out of the blackness so that he ran faster, head bent and arms pumping like a little boy’s, his breath coming in tearing gasps and the fear of a descending blow stiffening his shoulders in anticipation.

They reached the parked van by some stroke of good fortune and flung themselves into it. Rob started the clapped-out engine and reversed with a squeal of tyres, then accelerated hard away from Cat’s street and the railway embankment. Rob tried to remember where he had been and where he should be going. The streets formed an intricate triangle, alternately dark and patched with lurid light. Danny sat slumped sideways in the passenger seat.

Rob muttered, ‘Where the fuck are we?’ The side roads all looked the same. He jerked his head round furiously to Danny.

‘I’m sorry,’ Danny whined. ‘I dunno what happened. I just lost it.’

Rob was afraid of the eruption of violence within himself, as well as in other people. As if he could smell his disgusted fear, Danny wheedled, ‘You’ll stick up for me? Our word against theirs, isn’t it? If they catch us, that is.’

Rob only whispered on an exhaled breath, ‘You little …’ But he didn’t finish. Words that were too similar had been directed at him.

At last they reached the bypass, the open road that Rob had gunned the van down earlier on the way to the club. There was a bump and the tools in the back rattled a warning. He pulled the wheel and the van straightened again, then he blinked into the rear-view mirror and saw it. There was a flashing blue light behind them. He swore and Danny peered at him before looking behind.

‘Shit. Drive,’ Danny howled. ‘Drive, will you?’

Instinctively Rob stamped his boot down hard. There was too much play in the accelerator. The van shuddered and whined and picked up speed. At half past one in the morning there was almost no traffic on the road. They hurtled forward, deafened by the racing engine, and for a minute or two it seemed that the police car was falling back.

‘Yeah. Go, man!’ Danny shouted, with sudden wild elation.

But the police siren was closing on them, audible even over the engine roar. The van juddered as if it would fall apart.

Rob stared ahead. There was a bridge. Concrete pillars daubed with graffiti.

Lights coming the other way. Fast, a dazzle in his eyes. The road vanishing.

Brakes, the brakes. A long squeal, shrieking in his head, echo of an echo. And then a smash. Explosion of glass and metal and pain.

Rob moved his head. There was cold air, and a bright light in his eyes. The light was his own headlamps shining on grass and concrete slewed at a terrible angle. He turned with cold precision and saw that the seat next to him was empty and the passenger door open. Had Danny undone his seat-belt? Or in their hurry to get away from Cat’s had he never fastened it?

To undo his own caused him a breathtaking stab of pain. He swallowed it and pushed the driver’s door open with his shoulder. He crawled out on to the grass and saw a car stopped behind him, someone running. Before anyone reached him he pulled himself around the back of the van because the front was all smashed in against the bridge.

Danny was lying on his side on the verge. Rob knelt down beside him. He saw that there was blood coming out of his ear and nose.

‘Come on, mate.’ He leaned over him. ‘Get up now. Don’t piss about. Just get up, will you?’

Hands grasped his arms and began to drag him backwards.

‘He’s my mate, he’s all right,’ Rob was shouting. ‘What are you doing to him?’

A policeman knelt down in Rob’s place beside Danny.

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