‘Jeez, narrow escape then,’ says Bryony, chinking her glass against Manon’s. ‘You did the right thing.’
They stand looking out at the bar. Manon feels her shoes pinching at the sides of her toes and at the heel. Kim returns and hands them their vodkas, venturing past them to her seat with her pint. You’ve got to like that about Kim – she doesn’t impose ‘the chat’. Manon takes a sip from the glass and realises it’s a double. She’s already beginning to feel anaesthetised in her lower legs and light in her head, as if her blood were heading south. She shifts on her feet.
‘Christ, look at Davy,’ Bryony says, ‘listening away to Colin like he doesn’t want to chew off his own arm.’
‘He’s a lesson to us all, that boy.’
They drain their glasses and new ones appear – always doubles, some with Red Bull, some with tonic. The bar seems to get darker, more blurry, the music swimming in and out of Manon’s consciousness with snippets of conversation as she sways on her painful shoes, at times her eyes half closed.
She sits on the arm of Davy’s chair while he fiddles about with his phone, looking up at her by way of explanation, saying, ‘Chloe. She likes to check up on me. Make sure I’m not getting up to mischief.’
‘Make sure you’re not having any fun, more like,’ says Manon, realising too late that she’s said it out loud.
She looks to the banquette close by, where Kim is frowning and nodding, and Bryony is leaning in too close, a smudge of mascara down her face, shouting above the music in a slurry voice: ‘I moan about them, right, Kim. I mean, I’m never knowingly under-moaned. But fuck me, Kim – I don’t mean that literally, Kim,’ and she burps into her fist, ‘but fuck me, the kids, they’re everything.’
Stuart is to Manon’s right, seeming malevolently sober. He asks her where Harriet is.
‘Got a dinner with the brass – retired plods get-together or something.’
Stuart nods.
Then Davy is asking Stuart about where he’s from and what he did before joining the force.
‘Teaching assistant at a school in Peterborough, but it was crap.’
Davy nods, his curiosity laid gently to rest like a dead cat, and the two men sit in silence, both leaning forward, elbows on knees.
‘Why was it crap?’ Manon shouts eventually, casting an irritable glance at Davy.
‘Headmistress thought she was God’s gift, lording it about.’
Stuart addresses this to Davy, who nods placidly, ever the piercing observer of human interplay.
‘Isn’t a headmistress sort of supposed to lord it about – in her own school?’ shouts Manon again, scraping a chair in to join them.
‘She’d never listen to anyone’s opinion ’cept her own,’ he says, and she sees bitterness, the charm having fallen at one corner, like a faulty curtain.
‘Your opinion, you mean?’
‘Yeah, my opinion. Why not my opinion?’
‘Er, because you were a teaching assistant and she was the head?’
He frowns at her and then seems to remember himself, fashioning his face into an ironic smile. ‘What will you be up to over Christmas then, Sarge?’
‘Oh,’ she says, looking away. ‘I’m on the rota over Christmas.’
Manon lies in bed. She has mascara down her cheeks and the radio burbles beside her, at too low a volume for her to make out the words. She has been lying there thinking she must turn it up so she can listen, but the thought fails somehow to translate itself into action. Her limbs are heavy, sunk into the mattress, and the room is all broken apart, the ceiling rotating at a different rate and in a different direction to the walls and floor. Her clothes lie in a hastily discarded pile next to the bed. She closes her eyes but this increases the spinning, so she opens them again. If she could just turn up the volume on the radio so she could hear Control, she might get to sleep.
Her mind is a slur, a fluid, sliding mess of thoughts taking her back through time, the door to her mother’s bedroom ajar, her fourteen-year-old self, leaning on the door frame, seeing the coroner standing over the body in the bed. Ellie was behind her, and she had pushed her sister back, wanting to shield her, knowing if she saw, she would never get it out of her head.
Forward and back, a mudslide of dark association, her mind turns to Tony Wright. Deeping and Whitemoor Prison, both in the village of March. Did Wright find his way to Deeping one night, rising out of the Fenland marsh like some twisted Magwitch?
Back again, loose and morbid. Do not go gentle into that good night.
The image she had shielded from Ellie: their mother’s eyes open, her head on the pillow, her skin purple and mottled where the blood had stopped moving – it had gathered along the base of her like red wine in a tilted glass. Lividity. She knows the word for it now, but she didn’t then. ‘The black and blue discoloration of the skin of a cadaver, resulting from an accumulation of deoxygenated blood in subcutaneous vessels.’
Friday
Manon