The First Cut (4 page)

The fish spat angrily at her from the pan. ‘Do you need to turn the heat down?’ Greg asked, moving across to the stove. She felt his hand on her bum. Bit busy now, she thought, irritation beginning to bloom inside. Greg was confusing; some moments he loved her with an intensity that seemed uncontrollable, and at other times he was cold and unresponsive, as if she’d done something wrong but she never knew what. This might happen to all couples forced apart for too long, but truth be told, she felt abandoned.

Margaret made a fuss of laying the table while Liz argued with Dan about putting his DS away.

Nicky glanced over at Greg as he started chopping parsley with an ostentatiously large knife.

‘Be careful with that knife, Greg,’ Margaret counselled. ‘It looks ever so sharp.’

Greg speeded up his action and then threw the knife in the air, catching it by the handle on its way back down to the floor. Margaret gave a small scream. ‘Oh, in moments like this I ask myself, what would Bruce Willis do?’

Liz rolled her eyes. ‘Be serious.’

‘Bruce is always deadly serious, fighting for his family.’

‘You ever met Bruce Willis?’ Dan asked hopefully, attracted to the glamour of his uncle’s job.

Greg turned to Dan conspiratorially as he tipped the parsley over the fish fillets and Nicky brought the dish to the table. ‘Mr Willis to you. I’ve met him a couple of times. Know something, Danno? He once said something important to me.’ Greg paused and Nicky saw Dan’s eyes widen in anticipation. ‘He said: “Yippee-ki-yay, Yippee-ki-yay.”’

‘Don’t you mean “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!”?’ Dan shouted. Liz gave her son a stare that would have shrivelled spring bulbs.

‘Put it there, Danno!’ Greg high-fived his nephew. ‘One day you should come to Hollywood with me. We’ll have fun.’

Fourteen-year-old Dan turned to his mum. ‘Can I really go one day?’

‘We’ll see.’ Liz gave her brother a look that Nicky couldn’t decipher. Liz sniped at Greg but she adored him, that much was clear. Nicky tuned back into the conversation.

Margaret was mid-flow as they sat down and began raiding the serving dishes on the table. ‘I’m only your mum, dear, and I’m resigned to never seeing you, but with Nicky it’s a different story. You need to look after your wife, Greg, work out what’s important.’ She waved her fork uneasily.

‘Mum, with all due respect, that’s something for Nics and me to talk about.’

‘Those that play together, stay together,’ Arthur added.

‘Isn’t it pray?’ said Liz.

‘You get my point.’

They were talking about her as if she wasn’t there. It was a Peterson family trait.

‘If you’re away too long it just leads to fights—’

‘Bruce Willis is always fighting someone,’ Dan interjected as he bit into a huge piece of fish. Nicky hoped with petty pleasure that Liz had noticed.

‘No, Danno, he’s fighting
for
someone,’ added Greg. ‘Usually his family.’ He glanced at Nicky but looked quickly away. Nicky put her hands in her lap as the Petersons chomped in double-quick time through the meal she had spent ages creating. Greg was slippery. If he was put on the spot he tended to revert to irony and jokes to avoid having to confront what was being asked of him. ‘So at this moment I wonder what would Bruce Willis do? In a time of crisis, how would Bruce react?’

‘He’d kill someone!’ Dan shouted.

Nicky heard Liz drop her fork on the floor.

She put her head in her hands and was hit by a waft of something unpleasant on her fingers. The house would smell of fish for days afterwards as she tried to scrub away the lingering bad smells.

N
icky should have taken the day off work. Greg was leaving that evening and he wouldn’t be back for ten weeks, but the desk was two down – Bobby was off with stress and Mike had been handed the black bin liner just a week ago – and she needed to show her face. She didn’t want to lose her job.

She watched a man in overalls carry a dead yukka out of the editor’s office. I should write the obituary for this whole industry, she thought, as Maria plonked a flat white on her desk, from Costa Coffee on the ground floor.

‘Good riddance,’ muttered Maria as they watched their former boss’s boxes being stacked on a trolley.

‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Nicky replied.

‘I’ve given up wishing for anything,’ Maria said. ‘That way I can’t be constantly disappointed.’

‘You’d think in this job we’d gain a sense of perspective on life – and death,’ Nicky said.

‘Perspective is for fools,’ Maria said, leaning forward over the desk. ‘Now, how was your shagathon?’

Nicky made a face and she caught Maria looking at her. There was a pause.

‘You know, whenever I ask you about Greg, you give me this tragic look.’

‘He’s leaving tonight.’

‘I already know that.’

Maria was a good journalist: persistent and nobody’s fool. Nicky squirmed. She fiddled uselessly with the corner of a piece of paper. ‘He’s away so much, it pisses me off.’

‘So move to LA, go freelance, get knocked up – you’ve got options.’

Nicky sighed. She loved Maria. She was relentlessly upbeat about other people’s options and pessimistic about her own. What she couldn’t tell Maria was that she was frozen. She suspected that if she announced to Greg she was moving to California, he would suddenly find an excuse to be working in China. It wasn’t the distance, it was the intention. Not for the first time Nicky wondered if theirs was a love that had been born of something that was fundamentally wrong and so wasn’t sustainable.

Maria reached over the computers and wiped a Post-it down on her desk. ‘This guy’s phoned twice already this morning.’

It took Nicky a moment to place the name – it was Adam from the plane. She’d forgotten about him. Sort of. ‘Did he say what it was about?’

‘No.’

She felt Maria’s eyes boring into her as she picked up the phone, but there was no connection to the mobile number.

‘Another option is to have an affair,’ Maria said slyly.

Nicky didn’t answer. She felt a blush creeping across her cheeks.

‘Well, well, you are a one,’ Maria said quietly to her computer screen and Nicky threw the plastic top of her coffee cup at her.

She looked up to see Bruton, the news editor, advancing across the office towards them. Advancing was the right word, Nicky thought. It applied to glaciers as they travelled down valleys and perfectly described the speed Bruton adopted in the office. She had never seen him rush, not even when the Twin Towers collapsed, but he was sharp and quick and it was a mistake to equate his physical slowness with a lack of mental agility. Bruton’s movement petered out when he eventually came alongside them.

‘What we got today?’ His voice was a truck emptying gravel.

‘There’s a former chancellor of Durham Univ—’

He interrupted Maria. ‘Boring. Don’t lead with that.’

Nicky picked up the reins. ‘We’ve got an actress in Ealing comedies who had an affair with a former president—’

‘Picture?’

‘It’s sexy and good enough quality to run big.’ He nodded, then pulled a white plastic tube from his trouser pocket and sucked deeply on it. Nicky continued. ‘There’s a climber who scaled Everest and invented a crampon that—’

‘No. The editor’s been sacked. We don’t have to indulge his interests any more.’

‘Bruton, it looks like you’re smoking a tampon applicator,’ Maria said.

Bruton took the piece of white plastic from his lips and stared at it uselessly. He coughed and a sound like stones rattling in a bag hit them. He stared with disappointment at the substitute cigarette; it wasn’t giving him the hit he needed. He pointed the tampon applicator at the empty editor’s office. ‘Word is we’re going downmarket.’ Maria gave a sarcastic hurrah. ‘That means more affairs, more scandal and more dead women.’

‘So it’s goodbye to civil servants,’ Nicky added. And at that they all cheered before Bruton was ambushed by a fit of coughing so severe Nicky felt concerned enough to get out of her seat and pat him on the back.

Nicky loved her job and had happily done it for years. She knew there were journalists who looked down on obituaries, thought of them as pages to flick through on your way to the sport. There was also no opportunity to have your name attached to what you wrote; an obituary belonged to the deceased and no one else. ‘There’ll be no promotion into a column from this desk,’ Maria sometimes said. Nicky wasn’t going to get a colour headshot in the paper any time soon; wasn’t going to get the smallest taste of a low-grade kind of celebrity. That suited her just fine. She did wonder, however, being surrounded by death so much, what would be written in her own obituary. Not much. In that she was just like millions of others, living out her small and inconsequential life. Only a tiny number, Nicky knew, ever made an impact, ever did things important enough to be written about, to have their details stored on electronic files, the story of their lives written before that life was over. For everyone else it was a case of one day you’re here, and then you’re gone; cancer or an accident or finally old age ends it with hardly a ripple. Good and bad deaths, but still a life to sum up. She took a sip of coffee. And then there was Grace, defined not by her life, but by the way she died; remembered for not having been served by justice.

‘You look miles away,’ Maria said, twisting a pen around in her hair and poking it into the middle of a makeshift bun.

Nicky smiled. ‘I’m thinking about death,’ she said.

‘Don’t spend too long on it. I think of it like flu – catching.’

Nicky spent the morning scanning news wires for sudden announcements, spoke to some freelancers and then, since the sun was shining, went for an early lunch. As she was crossing the lobby she came up short. Adam was sitting on a sofa by the door.

She felt her stomach contract as he stood and walked towards her, his hands in the pockets of his trousers. They shook hands and he didn’t apologize for coming to her work, or seem embarrassed about appearing too keen.

‘This is a surprise,’ Nicky began to say.

‘Don’t be worried, I’m not after a job,’ he said, flashing that devastating smile.

She gave him a rueful look. ‘That’s a relief. This isn’t the place to be asking for jobs nowadays.’

‘It’s about my aunt. She’s not got long left. I’ve been doing a bit of digging into her life, and I thought she might make a good subject for an obituary.’

Oh sweet, thought Nicky. She did believe Adam had a crush on her. Well, a mini one at least. She doubted very much that Adam really had anything of any use to her – people tended to overestimate how interesting their own family members were. ‘Is that why you were trying to phone me earlier?’

‘Yeah.’

They walked together to the revolving door and out into the summer heat. Nicky yearned for a sandwich and a drink on a bench in the napkin of grass round the corner. ‘So when you couldn’t get hold of me you decided to come and tell me straight away?’

Adam shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m just a bit excited, that’s all. Can I buy you lunch and tell you about her?’

Nicky put up a strong protest. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re not buying me anything. But you’re very welcome to join me for a sandwich and a Coke. There’s a good café—’

‘Let me take you to lunch. Honestly, it’s my pleasure.’

‘I simply can’t let you do that.’ But she just couldn’t manage to pack her smile away.

‘I’m sure you think my aunt is just a line, but you’re blunt enough to tell it to me straight. Either way, I’m buying you lunch.’

Nicky could feel the warmth on her back melting away the worries of the office and the blackness at home. She could sit under a tree with Adam by her side. ‘OK, you win.’

‘Fantastic.’

She set off for the park but Adam hesitated. ‘Can we go somewhere else? Can I choose?’

‘I’ve got one hour, no longer.’

‘I don’t want to stay in the open air; it’s too visible.’

‘Pardon?’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got a bit of a stalker problem and I don’t want you to get involved.’

‘A stalker?’ She realized she must be looking very unconvinced as Adam began to walk round the back of the building and down an alley cast in deep shadow.

‘I went out with a girl called Bea for a few months and it’s been over for a while but she won’t accept it. She sometimes follows me, makes silent phone calls . . .’ He shrugged his shoulders with irritation. ‘Sorry, it all sounds rather dramatic, but—’

‘No, no, I understand.’ Nicky was only half listening. She was thinking about the unread emails that were piling up in her inbox.

‘She was particularly nasty to a girl recently—’

Nicky stopped walking and turned full on to Adam. ‘What did she do?’

‘I was seeing this girl, Rebecca. Bea followed her home and started screaming at her as she was trying to get in her front door. Really shook her up.’ Nicky didn’t reply. ‘Needless to say, that was the last I saw of Rebecca.’

‘I can imagine,’ she said carefully, instinctively looking around but seeing no one. ‘Well, if it’s any help, I can take care of myself.’ After Grace was murdered she had taken a self-defence course. Maria had said it was a way to channel her anger and make her feel less useless. The instructor had told her to stop pummelling the boxing punchbag so hard. She’d ignored him, and wordlessly venting her fury at Grace’s death she’d ended up spraining her wrist.

While she didn’t dismiss Bea completely, she did feel there were perhaps some histrionics involved – the passions and dramas of those in their early twenties. But she didn’t want her lunch ruined so willingly followed Adam. She knew what Maria would say if she recounted this tale: ‘Bea won’t bother you; she’ll think you’re his boss – or his mother.’

She waved at Bruton as he leaned against the back of the building, a cloud of real smoke drifting away across the concourse. They crossed an arterial road and Adam kept on.

‘Where are we going?’

‘A little place down here.’

‘Which one? I know all the lunch places near my office.’

He turned up a street and round a corner. ‘Here.’