The Horse Dancer (36 page)

She nodded. Something was igniting inside her.

He glanced at her, then behind him, and took a long drag on his cigarette. When he exhaled, it was hard to tell whether it was smoke or the hot cloud of his breath. ‘He’s down at Stepney. Behind the car site. The Pikeys have got him. Sal’s going to race the grey mare against him the day after tomorrow, him and the bay trotter.’

‘But Boo can’t pull a sulky. He’s never been driven in his life.’

Ralph looked awkward. ‘He has now. Sal put him in his two-wheeler and drove him down there before breakfast.’ He shrugged. ‘He were quite good. Not fast, like the grey mare, but he never kicked it out or nothing.’

All that long-reining, Sarah thought absently. He would have obeyed everything Sal told him. ‘Where are they racing?’

‘Usual place. The flyover. Be about six thirty.’

‘What can I do?’ she asked. ‘How can I get him back?’

‘Nothing to do with me, Sezza. I’ve said too much already.’

He made to leave, but she grabbed his wrist. ‘Ralph. Please. Help me.’ Her mind was racing. ‘Please.’

He shook his head.

‘I can’t do this by myself,’ she said. But she was still thinking. She sat, her other hand clenching in her pocket, while Ralph sucked his cigarette and pretended she wasn’t touching him.

‘I’ve got to go, mate,’ he said finally. ‘Places to be.’

‘Look,’ she said, ‘meet me somewhere. Not near the race – nowhere Sal could see you. Meet me at the back of the furniture factory. With Boo’s saddle and bridle.’ She reached into her pocket, pulled out the yard keys and pressed them on him. ‘Here. You can get them long before Sal’s even there.’

‘What use are they?’

‘To ride him with.’

‘What? You’re just going to go along and tack him up, are you? Ride away? Please, mister, can I have my horsy back?’

‘Just meet me, Ralph.’

‘Nah. What’s in it for me? If Sal finds out I’ve had anything to do with you he’ll batter me.’

She didn’t let go of his wrist, but dropped her voice so that the other passengers wouldn’t hear. ‘A gold credit card.’

He laughed. ‘As if.’

‘And the pin number. I promise you, Ralph, I can get it for you. Someone with big money. You can get out loads of cash before they stop it. Maybe even thousands.’

He scanned her face, then removed his arm from her grip. ‘You’d better not be mucking me about.’

‘You have to promise me you’ll be there,’ she said. ‘No tack, no deal.’

He glanced behind him again, then spat on his palm and held it towards her. ‘Friday morning by the furniture factory. If you’re not there by seven I’m outers.’

Liam poked the pasta with his fork and wrinkled his nose. ‘It looks like bogeys,’ he said.

‘It does not look like bogeys,’ Conor said equably. ‘And, Joseph, don’t kick the table leg like that, sweetheart. You’re going to knock everyone’s drinks over.’

‘And it tastes like bogeys,’ Liam insisted. He shot a glance at Natasha.

‘It’s just pesto sauce. Your mother says you eat it all the time.’

‘I don’t like
this
pesto sauce,’ Joseph said, pushing his plate away vigorously. It was only Natasha’s intervention that stopped his glass of juice spilling over her own pasta.

The boys had not wanted to eat Daddy’s fish-fingers. They wanted to go to the pizza restaurant. They had been there for almost three-quarters of an hour and she and Conor had hardly exchanged a word except to order their drinks.

‘Joseph, can you sit up, please? I know you don’t sit like that at home.’

‘But this isn’t home.’

‘This is a restaurant,’ Conor said, ‘so it’s even more important that you sit up properly.’

‘But I don’t like these chairs. They make my bottom all slidy.’

Natasha watched Conor prop his younger son upright on the chair beside him for the fourteenth time, and wondered at the expression of resigned patience he wore. Eating dinner with his sons had been like herding fish while negotiating with the potentates of two warring Balkan factions. Every time one thing was established, another war began, whether over garlic bread or napkins or a seat that was apparently too slidy for a small person’s bottom. All of this had been directed at their father. They had neither acknowledged her nor sought to bring her into their conversations.

Had the mother briefed them? Had she primed them to collect information on Daddy’s girlfriend? Had Natasha been deemed a hate figure long before she had even met them?

She felt Liam’s eyes on her and forced a smile, trying not to think about the time she could have spent preparing tomorrow’s papers. ‘So,’ she said, wiping her mouth with her napkin. ‘Do you like
Thomas the Tank Engine
? My nephew loves him.’

‘No,’ Liam said scornfully. ‘That’s for babies.’

‘But you can get really super train sets, grown-up ones, with
Thomas
characters. I’ve seen them.’

They looked blankly at her.

‘What do you like, then?’ she said, gamely. ‘What are your hobbies?’

‘You like riding your bikes, don’t you, boys?’ Conor interjected. ‘And playing computer games.’

‘Joseph broke my PlayStation,’ Liam said, ‘and Mummy says we don’t have enough money to get it fixed.’

‘I never broke it,’ Joseph protested, adding darkly, under his breath, ‘Poo-head.’

‘Mummy says we have no money. No money for fun things at all.’

‘Well, that’s not true,’ said Conor. ‘Your mother gets an awful lot of money from me. And if you’re missing out on things, you should tell me. You know I’ll always do what I can.’

‘Mummy says you give us the briar minimum.’

‘I want a Nintendo,’ Liam said. ‘Everyone at school has one.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true.’ Conor’s voice was becoming strained.

‘It is.’

‘My nieces and nephews aren’t allowed computer games,’ Natasha ventured. ‘They still have lots of fun.’

‘Well they’re stupid.’

She took a deep breath and forked up some pasta.

‘C’mon, boys. Let’s tell Natasha some of the fun things we do. Sometimes we take our bikes to Richmond Park, don’t we? We like riding our bikes.’

‘No,’ said Joseph. ‘You shouted at me that I wasn’t going fast enough.’

‘I didn’t shout at you, Joe. I just wanted you to be where I could see you.’

‘But your wheels are really big and mine are small.’

‘And we like ice-skating,’ Conor continued.

‘You said it was a rip-off,’ Liam said.

‘I do think it was a little pricy, yes.’ Conor cast a look in her direction. ‘But we still had a good time, didn’t we?’

‘You and Mummy are always going on about money,’ Joseph said mournfully.

Natasha had lost what little remained of her appetite. She folded her napkin and placed it beside her plate. ‘Boys,’ she said, reaching for her jacket, ‘it’s been lovely to meet you but I’m afraid I’ve got to go.’

‘Already?’ Conor laid a hand on her arm.

‘It’s nearly eight, and you know I’ve got a big day ahead.’

‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that you might just put us first for tonight. Given the occasion and all.’

‘Conor . . .’

‘I’ll be taking them home in half an hour. It’s not much longer, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Look,’ she lowered her voice, ‘put yourself in Sarah’s shoes. She’s a kid, and she’s about to be moved on to her fourth home in a matter of months. I’ll be here with you to see your boys for ever after.’ She reached out surreptitiously to touch his hand, conscious of the boys’ eyes on her. ‘It might even be best if we keep this first meeting short. I’ll get to know your boys, Conor, but I have to sort out this mess first. I took her on. I can’t just walk away.’

‘Sure.’ His tone was clipped. He went back to his food as she wrestled her bag from the back of her chair, then added casually, ‘Will Mac be there?’

‘I have no idea,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’

For a long time before he had become a photographer, Mac had used a strategy in life that if it didn’t presage his career perhaps suggested some aptitude for it. When situations became uncomfortable or overly emotional, when he didn’t want to have to deal with what was happening in front of him, he would turn down the sound in his mind and view the tableau from a distance, as if he was posing a picture. Raw emotion was filtered by this lens, reduced to a beautiful composition, an extraordinary meeting of light and line. At twenty-three, he had eyed his father’s body in his coffin like this; the familiar face too still and cold, as if it had long been left behind. He had framed it, observing with a distant eye the way death had relaxed the muscles and wiped away long-held tensions, along with a lifetime of expression, from the features. He remembered watching Natasha lying in bed after the second miscarriage, curled up under the duvet, her position an unconscious foetal reminder of what she had lost. She had already turned away from him, closed herself off. He had, felt her emptiness echo in himself, until it was almost unbearable, and had focused instead on the way the light played on the folds of the bedcover, the delicate strands of her hair, the haziness of early morning.

And he did it now, watching the two females seated in front of him, the older perched neatly on the sofa in her work suit explaining to the younger why she herself would be leaving the house tomorrow morning and would not return, and why the girl would ultimately move to another, more appropriate home.

Sarah did not shout, beg or plead, as he had dreaded. She just watched Natasha talk and nodded, asking no questions. Perhaps she had anticipated this from the moment she had arrived. Perhaps he had been fooling himself with hopes of how they could make it work.

But it was Natasha who drew his eye. Now, against the pale sofa cushions, her back straight and poised, it was as if a storm had passed over her, leaving skies that, if not blue, were calm; skies under which you could see an awful long way from where you were standing. She’s let go, he observed. Whatever I did the other night, I set her free. This thought came with unexpected pain, and he realised that he, standing back, was the most emotional of the three: only he was blinking back tears. ‘We’ll work something out, Sarah,’ he found himself saying, as the room became silent. ‘I’ll pay your horse’s rent, if I have to. We won’t just let you fall.’

Finally Natasha rose. ‘Right,’ she said, looking him full in the face for the first time. ‘We’re straight. Everyone knows what’s going on. Are you two okay if I go and pack?’ A shorter-than-average thirty-five-year-old woman, with little makeup and hair that hadn’t been brushed since that morning. Not a model or stylist, not a vision of classical beauty. Mac watched her go. Sarah fixed her gaze diplomatically on Natasha’s handbag.

‘You okay?’ he said to her. Upstairs they could hear Natasha’s heels as she went to and from the airing cupboard.

‘Fine,’ Sarah said calmly. ‘Actually, I’m a bit hungry.’

He smacked the side of his head, forcing a smile. ‘Supper. I knew I’d forgotten something. I’ll go and make it. You coming through?’

‘I’ll be along in a minute,’ she said.

It was as if she had guessed he needed a moment alone. Or, at least, that was what he thought at the time. Later he discovered it had been something quite different.

 

 

 

Sarah stood behind the parked Transit van, a hundred yards from the intersection of the two flyovers, oblivious to the small clouds of breath that evaporated into the damp air in front of her. She had been there for the past half an hour, long enough for her toes to lose all feeling in the chilly morning and her jacket to dampen under the persistent drizzle. She stood, beneath the sodium lighting, on this desolate stretch of road where the marshes segued into the city, under the web of pylons tracing the inevitable march towards urbanisation.

She had almost lost hope when she saw the first trucks arriving. Now she shifted, trying to ease the weight of her rucksack on her shoulders, her eyes never straying from them as they disgorged their passengers on to the slip-road. Even from here she could see Maltese Sal’s men, clapping their hands in the cold, laughing and exchanging cigarettes, the onlookers who climbed out behind. It was a big race, the biggest she had seen. The side-road under the flyover was filling quickly with a line of vehicles, a small crowd spilling out, the atmosphere upbeat, expectant, despite the early hour, the bleakness of the setting. The end of the race was here, at the beginning of her own. Looking at all these men, the vehicles, she found she was shivering. She reached down, placing her fingers around the reassuring edges of the plastic card in her pocket.

It was twenty-five to seven.

She clenched her toes experimentally in her boots, wondering if it was possible to run on feet she could no longer feel. The men stood in small huddles, some raising brightly coloured umbrellas, chatting as if they were meeting for nothing more than an early-morning catch-up. She had asked Ralph three times if he knew for sure, and each time he had sworn he did. But could she trust him? Could his friendship with her override his worship of Maltese Sal? Was this a trap? She kept thinking of how he had turned away from her in the yard. Ralph lived by his own rules: singular, self-serving. Unreliable. But she had to trust him: she had no other option.

Her stomach rumbled. It was almost twenty to seven. They should have been here long before now. There must have been a change of plan. It was a different race. Boo wasn’t coming, she thought, and her heart sank. She couldn’t think what she would do if he didn’t; she had no back-up plan. Everything was burnt, ruined, from the moment she had left the Macauleys’ house. She thought briefly of Mac and Natasha, who would probably have woken up. How soon would they guess what she had done?