‘Right you are, DI Huevo,’ he says, under his cone of light, still looking through sheaves of papers.
‘I won’t always be this preposterous shape, you know,’ she says, heaving down like a weighty pebble. She lifts her legs stiffly onto the coffee table, noticing that her ankles are swollen. The position forces her to lie back.
‘Have you ever read anything by Saul Bellow?’ he says, writing on his pad. She loves this, working together, late at night, talking about disclosure, about prosecution and defence, about Saul Bellow. Flirty intellectuals.
‘Urgh,’ she says. ‘Hate Saul Bellow. Really boring.’
‘Oh right. Was thinking of trying him. What did you read that you hated?’
‘Dunno, something with “Rabbit” in the title. Man, it was boring.’
‘D’you mean Rabbit, Run?’
‘Yeah, that one.’
‘By John Updike?’
‘Yup.’
‘So have you ever read anything by Saul Bellow?’
‘I don’t think so, no.’
The next thing she knows, her hair is being gently smoothed across her forehead. He has her slippers in his other hand.
‘You’re brave holding those,’ she says sleepily.
‘I know. Well, slipper emergency. Shall I take your shoes off for you?’
‘Oh my God, would you? Only bending—’
‘Say no more. You certainly know how to snore.’
‘Yeah, right. I wasn’t even asleep.’
‘Must’ve been the boiler,’ he says. ‘You didn’t fart either.’
He is jimmying off her shoes, which seem to have become wedged onto her swollen feet. Why does pregnancy make everything swell up? Fingers, feet, ankles, neck, face. It’s so ungainly. She has shut her eyes again, simply because it is impossible to keep them open, and is horrified to feel him massaging her feet. She wonders if they smell or feel sweaty in his hands, but then the sensation takes over and it is so erotic, the release of pressure up her legs and along her spine, that she groans.
‘Where did you learn to do this?’ she asks.
‘Law school,’ he says. ‘You must be exhausted.’
‘Doesn’t even begin to cover it. I dream of mere exhaustion. How much more evidence is there to get through?’
‘Tons.’
She is quiet, thinking about the kneading of her feet and the line he has crossed and why he has crossed it. He is putting on her sheepskin slippers and she says, ‘Oh, is that it?’
‘Afraid so – cuts to legal aid and all that.’
‘I hate austerity Britain.’
He has got off his perch on the coffee table and has come to sit on the sofa next to her.
She wonders what he intends.
He takes her hand in his. ‘We should talk,’ he says.
She closes her eyes. Here we go, she thinks. Another fuckwit who will announce he’s in love with someone else, or he likes petite women, or flat stomachs, or he likes men, or he really likes space, lots and lots of space, in which to shag other women … Her heart has sped up and her breaths are shallow. No more. No, she will not go down this road with him, not in her condition, not with Fly to think about. She opens her eyes and makes them cold.
‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing to talk about.’
He looks disappointed.
‘I would get up and march briskly away,’ she says, smiling in order to appear conciliatory and ever so grown up. ‘In a way that would be forthright but also wildly attractive. Except I can’t actually get up and anyway I’m too tired.’
‘I think you are wildly attractive,’ he says. He has laid his head back on the sofa cushions, like hers. His body is turned towards her. Their foreheads are almost touching. She can feel the warmth of his breath, its sulphurous smell making her feel vaguely sick. She wishes pregnancy hadn’t made her so hyper-sensitive to odour – they could use her at crime scenes in place of sniffer dogs. Pregnant women on leashes, leading forward on all fours.
Still, she’s not about to exit a moment where someone finds her wildly attractive, even if it involves a touch of nausea.
‘Is it the chins?’ she asks. ‘Is that what’s turning you on?’
‘It’s the whole egg-like package.’
She nods, looking down at the mountainous undulations of her body. ‘I can see it’s pretty irresistible.’
‘Can I kiss you?’ he asks.
‘Well, fortunately for you, I am rendered immobile.’
He leans in and kisses her and an arrow dart of excitement shoots down the length of her body, her tiredness evaporating. She awakens, pushing herself upright and kissing him back, now leaning over him, clambering on to him. The bump has disappeared, so wonderful is it to be close to him, to smell him. She feels like a teenager making out, her clothes hot and constricting, her face burning from his stubble. After what seems like hours but is probably only twenty minutes, she straightens away from him and leans back, sighing. The bump’s edges have become impossibly tight.
‘Pregnancy makes you so horny. Think it’s the blood flow to your privates. I’ve spent the last five months dry humping my pillows.’
‘Wow, I feel so special right now,’ he says.
They sit there in silence, holding hands, heads back on the sofa cushions.
‘Whose baby is it?’ he says.
‘No one’s.’
‘That’s medically impossible.’
‘Not these days it isn’t.’
‘D’you not want to tell me? You don’t have to.’
‘Look,’ Manon says, and she can’t believe she’s saying this, ‘I just don’t think we should talk about either of our situations, that’s all. You’ve had too much to drink to drive home. Come on, let’s go to bed.’
He is reading Knausgaard, he says.
‘That’s a bad sign,’ she says.
She has returned from the bathroom wearing her Marks & Spencer nightie, long-sleeved with polka dots, which might as well be a placard saying, KEEP AWAY ALL MALES. She wonders if M&S aren’t specialising in this line and should make it one of their labels, like Autograph.
He holds her throughout the night – her hand, her arm – or wraps himself around her like a co-parachutist, falling. For the first time since Fly’s arrest, she gets a decent night’s sleep, not uninterrupted, but not the usual tortured thrashing with hours of vigilant wakefulness.
This is not a thing, Manon tells herself when she rouses groggily at 4 a.m., stumbling to the bathroom for a pee, before the free-fall of dreaming takes her back down. It’s just a temporary diversion. He is very silent and still in his sleep and this quietness holds some secret about him, but it doesn’t matter. It won’t go anywhere. She stares at his tufts of hair in the grey early light, his crumpled face, pale and featureless without his heavy-rimmed glasses.
Is he a serious person? Can he be trusted?
The next time she wakes, she can smell shower gel and he is sitting on the edge of the bed, suited and booted, holding out a cup of coffee for her.
He says, ‘I’m back on the hunt for a pathologist today. You?’
‘I’m digging about for more on Claybourne Leisure. You defend, I’ll prosecute,’ she replies, drinking. It is wildly delicious as only the first coffee of the day can be – smoky, strong and thirst-quenching after the dry deserts of the night. She smiles at him.
‘Gis a kiss,’ he says.
Day 25
8 January