Only Darkness. Danuta Reah
they’d giggled and messed about. The students stopped cooperating when it came to writing, though, and dealing with the disruption, the constant demands for attention, requests for pens and paper tried her patience almost to breaking. By the end of the afternoon she had a headache and was too exhausted to feel hungry, even though she hadn’t eaten since she left the house that morning.
When Rob Neave got to the staff room it was gone quarter past five. Debbie was sitting in her chair drinking coffee and eating chocolate. She offered a piece to him. ‘What is it about teachers and chocolate?’ he said, turning her offer down.
‘This’ – she waved the chocolate bar – ‘is because I haven’t had anything since breakfast.’ He still looked tired, she noticed, as if he’d had as little sleep as she’d had these past few nights, but he looked better than he had in the morning, more like himself. She wanted to say something about this, but she couldn’t think of any way to say it that didn’t sound like an intrusion. ‘Have you heard about the cuts?’ she asked instead.
He had but didn’t seem too concerned. ‘I’m not planning a long stay here, anyway.’
Debbie wondered when he planned to leave. The place would be duller without him. ‘You said you wanted to see me about something, didn’t you?’
He seemed unsure of himself, which was unusual. ‘That thing at the station. I’ve been talking to some people,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘and it’s possible you did see something important that night …’ He was watching her closely now. Debbie put down her chocolate bar. She wasn’t hungry any more. ‘It’s a long shot,’ he said. ‘They’ll want to talk to you again, I think. Just – be a bit careful. Don’t use the train on your late nights.’
‘Is this official?’ Debbie tried hard to keep her voice calm.
‘No, it’s just advice. From me, not them.’
‘I need a drink.’ Debbie plucked up her courage. ‘Come and have a beer or something – if you’re free.’
He looked at his watch and hesitated. She thought he was going to refuse, but he said, ‘I’ve just got some stuff to see to in the office. Where are you going? Across the road? I’ll see you in half an hour.’
Suddenly elated, Debbie packed her work into her briefcase and sorted her mail into the out tray. As she was leaving the room, the phone rang, and it was a bit more than half an hour before she was walking through the door of the Grindstone into the smell of beer and old smoke, and saw Neave leaning on the bar, talking to the landlord.
He bought the first round, bringing the drinks over to a table, and dropping a packet of salted peanuts in front of her. ‘You need to get something inside you,’ he said, pushing his chair away from the table as he sat down, and hooking his foot over the rung of another. Debbie felt shy, as though she didn’t know what to say to him in this new context, but he didn’t seem to notice anything, and talked casually about the pub and how it had been the place where the police used to drink, when he was in the force. ‘More crimes got solved at this bar than at the station,’ was how he put it. He seemed more relaxed in this atmosphere, and Debbie asked him a bit about his life in the police force. He made her laugh with some stories of the things he’d seen and the people he’d met, and then he asked her about herself, moving on to her parents, her childhood, her current life and her plans for the future.
Debbie found herself talking about her father, something she didn’t often do. ‘He was a miner,’ she said. ‘It was in the family, kind of thing. His father was a miner as well. He used to spoil me rotten.’ Rob sat there quietly, watching her as she talked. ‘He couldn’t cope when they closed the pits down. He got paid off, but he couldn’t get another job. He used to hate the way the people down at the job centres talked to him.’ She paused. She wasn’t sure about the next bit.
‘What happened?’ He was sitting close to her, listening.
‘He died … It’s some time now.’ But Debbie could remember what it felt like, believing he hadn’t cared enough, thinking that he had chosen to leave them. She still felt angry about it. She wanted to change the subject. She realized that, though they’d been talking for a while, she still knew very little about Rob.
‘You’re not local, are you?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘I’ve lived round here for years, but no, I was born in North Shields. Lived in Newcastle while I was growing up.’
‘What brought you to Moreham?’ It seemed a strange place to come, to Debbie.
‘Nothing. I came to Sheffield to work.’ He still seemed relaxed, but Debbie was aware that he was stonewalling her questions, that he didn’t want to talk about himself.
She tried another tack. ‘You said you weren’t planning to stay at City. Where next?’
He was looking round the room, watching the other drinkers at the bar. ‘Nothing planned. But City has only ever been a temporary thing. You ought to be thinking about moving on as well. It’s no place to get stuck.’
‘I like it.’ Debbie recognized his ploy to turn the conversation back to her. ‘I like the students and I like the work. I am looking for something else though – but only because of what’s happening.’ She tried again. ‘Would you go to another college, or what?’
He laughed. ‘No, I’m not planning a career in college security. I don’t know yet, something. Do you want another drink?’
‘My round.’ Debbie reached for her purse and found it contained her travel pass and fifty pence. She went red. ‘Oh, God, I ask you for a drink and I haven’t got a penny on me.’
He thought it was funny. ‘I’ll ask you next time I’m broke. Don’t worry, Deborah. Come on, what do you want. I’m buying.’
‘OK, thanks, I’ll have the same again. But next time …’
When he came back from the bar he smoothly took charge of the conversation again. ‘Your father wasn’t an old man, was he?’
Debbie shook her head. ‘He was fifty-five when he died.’ She thought Rob was watching her, but he was looking across towards the bar, frowning slightly, as though he was thinking something over.
‘What is it that makes you so angry about it?’ His question was so unexpected that she felt winded. The response was forced out of her before she had time to think about his right to ask it.
‘Everything. All of them.’ She felt her face flush. ‘He thought it was his fault, you see. He was a pit deputy and he thought he should have joined the strike.’ She looked at Rob, uncertain whether to go on. ‘It wasn’t his fault. He voted to strike. He was Catholic,’ Debbie explained. ‘His mother’s family were deep-dyed Irish Catholics. So he felt guilty.’ She thought about it again. ‘They just threw them out, made them feel useless. Oh, there was good redundancy, but Dad didn’t want that, he wanted his job, he was proud of it.’
He leant towards her, his arms on the table. ‘And what happened?’
‘Nothing happened. He got cancer. Lung cancer. He’d had a cough for a while. But he wouldn’t do anything about it. We could tell, me and Mum, that he wasn’t well, but he just didn’t seem bothered. By the time they found it he was too far gone.’ She sighed. It had been an awful death.
‘You were his only daughter?’
‘His only child.’ Debbie smiled. ‘He wasn’t a practising Catholic by the time he met Mum. That was something else he felt guilty about.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not something I really understand.’
‘No. It’s not something I know much about.’ That was the first personal comment he’d volunteered.
She told him something about the stories her father used to tell about the priests and nuns, and her Aunt Caitlin’s house in County Cork with its holy pictures and statues.
‘You didn’t get