This. What I’ve brought you to.
It’s part of your job, she said.
But it wasn’t his job. He wasn’t a cop. He’d walked away from that part of his life because he couldn’t bear it a moment longer, because it had taken him away from Helen, and had he known how many hours upon hours he’d be away from her and each of those hours trickling through a glass in which the remaining days of her life were contained…. He would have called a halt to all of it.
No, he said. Not part of my job. That’s not why I was here.
Well, they asked you to. She asked you. I can’t think you did it all on your own. Came up with the plan, whatever.
I did. He said it heavily and he regretted having to say it at all. But I want you to know that if I’d known…because, you see, you don’t seem like…
Like them? she asked. I’m cleaner? More educated? More accomplished? Better dressed? More well-spoken? Well, I’ve had eighteen years to put them…it…that whole terrible…I want to call it an “episode” but it wasn’t an episode. It was my life. It made me who I am no matter who I try to be now. These sorts of things define us, Thomas, and that defined me.
Thinking that, he told her, negates the last eighteen years, doesn’t it? It negates your parents, what they did for you, how they loved you and made you part of their family.
You’ve met my parents. You’ve seen my family. And how we lived.
I meant your other parents. The ones who were your parents as parents are meant to be.
The Trahairs. Yes. But they don’t change the rest of it, do they. They can’t. The rest is…the rest. And it’s there as it always will be.
That’s no cause for shame.
She looked at him. She’d found the petrol station she was seeking, and they’d pulled into its forecourt. She’d turned off the ignition and rested her hand on the door handle. He’d done the same, ever the gentleman, unwilling to let her pump the petrol herself.
She said, That’s just it, you see.
What? he asked her.
People like you?
Please don’t, he said. There is no people-like-me. There are just people. There’s just the human experience, Daidre.
People like you, she persisted nonetheless, think it’s about shame because that’s what you would feel in the same circumstances. Travelling about. Living most of the time in a rubbish tip. Bad food. Cast-off clothing. Loose teeth and ill-formed bones. Shifty eyes and sticky fingers. Why read or write when one can steal? That’s what you think and you’re hardly wrong. But the feeling, Thomas, has nothing at all to do with shame.
Then…?
Sorrow. Regret. Like my name.
We’re the same, then, you and I, he told her. Despite the differences?
She laughed, a single weary note. We are not that, she replied. I expect you played at it, you and your brother and your sister and your mates. Your parents may have even found you a gipsy caravan and parked it somewhere quite hidden away on the estate. You could go there and play dress-up and act the part, but you couldn’t have lived it.
She got out of the car. He did the same. She went to the pumps and studied them, as if trying to decide which type of petrol she needed when she probably knew very well what was required for her car. As she hesitated, he went for the nozzle himself. He began to fill the tank for her.
She said, I expect your man does that for you.
He said, Don’t.
She said, I can’t help it. I’ll never be able to help it.
She shook her head in a fierce little movement, as if to deny or obliterate all that was left unspoken between them. She climbed back into the car and shut the door. He saw that she looked straight ahead afterwards, as if there was something in the window of the petrol station’s shop that she needed to memorise.
He went to pay. When he climbed in the car, he saw she’d put a neat stack of notes on his seat to cover the cost of the petrol. He took them, folded them neatly, and put them into the empty ashtray just above the gearshift.