Every Good Girl (17 page)

His shift, the early one that he preferred, had finished now but Jennifer's hadn't and he wondered about going up to the ward and seeing if she fancied something to eat when she got off later. Apart from visiting Mother, he didn't like going to the wards unless he was actually working. He hated that spare-part feeling, hanging around by the nurses' desk waiting for one of them to stop bustling and ask what he wanted – you couldn't just go wandering about
looking for the right one, everyone in the beds stared. Jennifer might be doing the bloods, or the teas or some very personal tending behind a curtain. He took his jacket out of his locker, extracted a 2p coin from the pocket and flipped it. Heads Jennifer first, tails Mother. Mother won (nothing new there, he thought vaguely) and he set out for the Care of the Elderly department. They used to call it Geriatrics, he recalled as he went, which he considered a word of some distinction. Then there'd been the phase when everyone pretended that old people were exactly the same as everyone else: if you'd had appendicitis, it didn't matter whether you were seventeen or seventy, it was the same illness. Except that it wasn't. When you were seventeen and went home, your mum looked after you and you got better in a week or so. If you were well over seventy like Mother, then after hospital you were a weak and unreliable convalescent and never quite the same again. He'd heard enough patients' relatives muttering that next time it was likely to be the last, curtains, all that.

Monica now ruled the ward. Over the dawn-light breakfast she'd terrorized the young assistant who brought round the food and tried to distribute it as silently and stealthily as possible. She was terrified of Monica who kept a beady critical watch over her and grumbled as if the eggs should have been prepared by Albert Roux.

‘Why give us eggs at all?' she demanded of Graham, complaining at full volume that she'd been faced with something that may have had only three minutes boiling but had been almost fossilized in the hot trolley. ‘We're forever being quizzed about our bowels. Eggs like that sabotage one's entire system. Why do they ask if we've “been” as they so coyly put it, when they serve
up food that guarantees the answer “no” for a good four days? And that woman over there – ' She pointed across to the bed opposite to a sleeping lady whose complexion was the colour Graham usually noted in the patients he transported to the mortuary – ‘
She
can't take anything that hasn't been liquidized, so do you know what they did?' As usual she neither waited for nor expected a reply. Conscious of the rising volume, Graham felt his shoulders hunch in an attempt to be invisible. ‘They shoved her egg through a sieve and then down her throat. Almost choked and died.' Monica looked highly satisfied with her complaints. The rest of the ward's occupants shuffled their magazines and adjusted their headsets.

‘Social Services are coming as soon as they can fit us in,' he said carefully, trying to put off the moment when she'd discover how vague they'd been about exactly which day. He hoped Nina would have to deal with that one. ‘I'm organizing another rail for the stairs and they might say we need some in the bathroom too. We could put a shower in,' he suggested tentatively.

‘A shower? We've got a shower, a perfectly good one,' she sniffed.

‘That's in the bath. I mean one you walk into with its own door, no stepping over big ledges where you could trip.'

‘There's nothing wrong with my eyesight,' Monica retorted, ‘I don't have any trouble seeing where the side of the great big pink bath is. What do they think I am, totally decrepit?'

Not yet, Graham thought to himself with dread, but it was a good idea to prepare. Further ahead – how far or near exactly? – was the prospect of much more intense looking after. Nina should be doing that, he thought. Daughters were for the personal things. He
did personal things at work, portering those of unreliable bladder, those who reacted badly to coming out of anaesthetic. He didn't want it in his off-time as well. He would never be without a mop. He felt depressed. After he'd quietened her down with talk of the cat and the garden, Graham set off for home. He felt the need for fresh air, great gasping lung-fulls of it. He left his car for later and set off striding across the Common, head down against the scudding wind, staring down to where only the sprouting grasses and the dog-stained bases of trees were properly in focus.

‘Oh.
You're
here.' Henry walked in through Nina's back door and found himself in the unusual presence of Joe. No-one else seemed to be around.

‘Hi Henry, glad to see you making yourself so much at home,' Joe replied.

‘What? Oh, yes, well. It's just the neighbourly way in,' he said, looking back at the door as if expecting it to say something in his support. ‘Must be my Northern upbringing.'

He sauntered over towards the sofa but then hovered around awkwardly, inhibited by Joe's rather off-putting presence. Joe looked grim; normally he'd point out and laugh at Henry's display of tactlessness. He wanted to ask where Nina was, as she was obviously who he'd come to see. All that sympathy and support he'd given to Nina over the past difficult year and Joe was allowed back in to make free with the house as if he was perfectly welcome. Henry didn't approve of civilized separations. Marriages that ended, particularly this one, should be a proper battlefield, then everyone knew where they stood. He resorted to polite niceties. ‘How are you all anyway? I saw Emily earlier, running like the hounds of hell were after her.'

Joe leaned against the sink and studied Henry, unsmiling and silent. Henry put his hands in his pockets and stared back, wondering what he'd done. He felt like a bad schoolboy about to be told by a furious headmaster: ‘Of course you know why I've sent for you.' Perhaps Joe was calculating just how close he'd got to Nina since the divorce. Gleefully, Henry prepared to torture him a bit, hint that there was more going on than the odd drink and movie together. Joe, though, had a miles-away look about him, so he might not even take it in.

‘I've just come to ask Nina about the paint. Whether she wants me to get it or will she,' he started explaining, feeling annoyingly flustered.

‘I don't know anything about it. Sorry Henry, I assumed you'd called in because you'd seen the police car outside and couldn't resist nosing in. Do you fancy a drink?' Joe opened the fridge and pulled out a can of beer and a bottle of white wine that had been opened previously. He pulled the cork out and took a sniff. ‘I don't know how long she's had this but it smells more or less OK.'

‘Er, no thanks,' Henry told him, perching nervously on the arm of the sofa. ‘I didn't see any police, but what
were
they here for? If you don't mind telling me, that is.'

‘Out on the Common, there was a fucking flasher – he had a grab at Emily,' Joe told him, concentrating on pouring the wine as he said it to keep his voice under control.

Henry gave a nervous burst of laughter. ‘A flasher? Oh! I thought you'd been burgled or something dreadful like that . . .' The words were hardly out of his mouth before he felt his head connect with the floor and his body lose all sense of which way up it should
be. Joe had, in one staggeringly swift movement, put down both bottle and glass and hauled Henry into the air and down to the ground. He stood over him now, his foot against Henry's throat like a hunter showing off a shot tiger.

‘I used to think you were just a bit of a prat, Henry,' he said, his voice trembling with fury. ‘Now I know you're a
huge
one. You think it was funny? You think some harmless saddo just waved his limp little dick from a nice cosy distance? You think that would have sent Emily into a life-fearing panic?' He wandered back to the sink and continued pouring the wine as if nothing had happened. Henry stayed where he was, rigid with shock and feeling a ridiculous sense of embarrassment. Clambering up from the floor would only draw attention to the fact that he had been so forcefully (and easily) put there. Joe looked down on him with disgust and emptied his wine glass over Henry's paint-encrusted chest.

‘Oh just get up and go home, Henry. Go home and play with your fucking paints.'

‘It's nothing to do with sex, it's about physical domination. It's all about power,' Sally was saying to Nina at the gallery.

‘Yes I know all that.' Nina didn't want to talk about it. She sat on the floor, unpacking a box of glasses, taking rolls of bubble-wrap from each one and polishing meticulously before placing it on a shelf. She'd worked up a soothing rhythm to the work, smoothing out the bubble-wrap and laying it out flat on the floor, cleaning each glass the same way, starting with the bottom, twisting it clockwise and ending with a brisk wipe round the rim. The rims were different colours, a glimmering ring of sapphire or ruby or citron. They'd soon be sold – a set of six would make a good wedding present and it was coming up to that season.

Nina was immersing herself in the routine, shutting out thought. She rather wished she hadn't told Sally about Emily and her encounter on the Common, but then Sally walked her dog there just like most of the other residents and it was only fair to warn her. Emily had pleaded with her that if she really had to say anything, then just to say it was a flasher, nothing more. She felt tainted by being touched, and as if that feeling would be increased with each person who knew. Sally, never short of an opinion, inevitably contributed well-meaning interpretations. To her, as to Henry, exposure was just one of those nasty little occurrences that one
could expect – the sort of thing men with nothing better to do went out and did. No big deal: practically every woman you met had come across a flasher. It was thought of as one of life's unpleasantnesses, like treading in dog-dirt and just as easily forgotten. In fact Sally had been dangerously close to finding it funny. It was easy to imagine her thinking that
she
wouldn't have run home hysterical from seeing a man wave his penis at her, that she'd have given him what for, told him she'd seen a bigger dick on a dachshund, or that he should do that sort of thing in the privacy of his own bathroom. Emily, a week ago, would probably have said she'd have done exactly the same, but then that didn't account for the element of danger and threat and the awful aloneness. And he'd touched her, which made it real assault. Nina could have made it into a joke, said something like, ‘Guess what, Emily met a
flasher
on the way home from school. Poor girl didn't know where to look!' But then that would both be untruthful and a betrayal of Emily, who was outraged and devastated that someone could so thoroughly and unexpectedly call up terror. It didn't even begin to figure as something that could be laughed off, it was a wicked invasion.

‘I wish they wouldn't call them “flashers”,' Nina came out of her trance and said. ‘It almost makes it sound glamorous, sort of sequin-studded and joky, as if they're just one of life's little eccentricities and no more dangerous than a marauding fox out there in the bushes.'

‘Are they really any more dangerous though? Don't they get their kicks just by
showing
?' Sally asked. ‘I mean, all little boys wave their equipment around from the first day they can get their hands on it.' She laughed, ‘I remember Daniel only ever wanted to pee
out on the street against someone's hedge. I always used to ask him if he wanted to go, just before we left the house, and every time, after about a hundred yards when we got to where the shops and people started, there he'd be, unzipping and looking around for an admiring audience. I guess some men simply don't move on.'

‘They can start with that, according to the police, and then some of them carry on pushing for more thrills right up the scale towards rape or even murder. Emily is really traumatized, all the fight's knocked out of her and that's saying something. She's stayed in the house for three days now. She doesn't want to go out at all. Joe's offered to drive her to school and pick her up after but she says she's not going back this week, she's so angry that she can't cope.'

Sally's perfectly pencilled eyebrows rose up her forehead in surprise. ‘Joe? Is he back home with . . .' Nina laughed; trust Sally to pick up on the Joe situation as a priority – and that was even without being told what had happened at the flat. ‘No he
isn't
!' she told her, putting the last glass on the shelf and turning her blushing face to the floor as she gathered up the squares of bubble-wrap. Rather than chucking them straight into the bin, she put them carefully on the counter next to the till, ready for safe hoarding, amused to realize that without question she was turning into her own mother.

‘Joe's just spending a lot of time visiting and making sure that Em knows he's there for her. It's really useful, seeing as Mother's
still
in hospital.'

‘How kind,' Sally grinned knowingly. ‘Next thing you know his bathrobe will be hanging behind your bedroom door again.'

‘I don't think so. In fact I'm
sure
so,' Nina said. ‘For
one thing Catherine's bought him a disgusting peachy coloured one to go with the walls. Whatever happens, and nothing
will
, I'm not giving that house-room.'

‘You could take it down the garden for a ceremonial burning and then replace it, without saying a word, with something gorgeous like those navy blue waffled ones from Conran, or something cashmere,' Sally suggested.

‘Absolutely not!' Nina dismissed the idea. ‘I shall never again be responsible for the purchase of any of Joe's clothes. I never was, actually, come to think of it. I think it was one of the things he minded about. Catherine probably buys him silk socks from Muji and pretends they're actually a present, when really she's just being mumsy.' She shuddered. ‘Oh never again, what bliss.'