Nightingale Point. Luan Goldie
of these mad estate girls.’
They both turn to face the car park where a few boys cycle about in circles, shouting at each other. Tristan hadn’t even noticed them coming round. Behind them, on the wall, sit three older boys: Ben Munday, who has been able to grow a full beard since he was thirteen, and two others, who wear red bandanas around their heads like rap superstars. Tristan still owes Ben Munday twenty quid. Shit.
‘You know them ragamuffins?’ Mary asks.
He shrugs. ‘Nope. Not really.’
‘But they’re looking at you.’ She scratches at her left elbow and inspects it, as if she has been bitten by something.
Tristan really doesn’t have twenty quid right now, his own cash depleted weeks ago, and Malachi is being tighter than usual with the student grants and carer benefits that keep them both ticking over. He considers asking Mary but something about the way she frowns and fidgets tells him she’s not in the most giving of moods.
‘Tristan Roberts,’ Ben Munday calls.
Mary widens her eyes. ‘You don’t know them? Liar. They look like crack dealers, like Bloods and Crisps.’
He laughs so hard he needs to use her little shoulder to support himself, ‘It’s Bloods and Crips. Where you getting this stuff from?’
‘Don’t make fun of me.’ She shakes him off. ‘I see it on Oprah. I know all about gangbanging.’
‘Please, never say gangbanging again. And stop being so judgey. They’re kids from my school.’ Though they both know the wall boys are long past school age.
‘Eh, Tristan?’ Ben Munday calls again.
This time Tristan knows there’s no escape. ‘I better go check them out, all right?’ He nods at her as he walks off slowly, already thinking of how to downplay knowing a ‘gang’ when his nan next asks him about it. ‘And Mary, get rid of that nasty old watch.’
She watches Tristan walk over to the ragamuffins that line the wall. He touches fists with each of them, and Mary catches a glimpse of the big Cheshire cat smile that makes him so endearing. She doesn’t want to think anything bad of Tristan, who deserves a million chances to get it right, but he’s smoking too much marijuana and surrounding himself with too many bad influences.
When Mary promised the boys’ nan she would keep a close eye on them, she thought it would be an easy job. She had known them since they were babies and, despite their chaotic upbringing, they were mostly good boys. But Tristan worries her at the moment. It’s no longer as easy as telling him to stay off the streets and he stays off the streets. She can’t fool herself: she has no real control over him. It’s like what you see on Oprah. Boy listens to rap music telling him to go shoot a policeman. Next day boy goes and shoots a policeman. She worries about him. All the time she worries about him.
Again it comes: twitch, twitch, twitch. She pushes her short blunt nails into her bony elbow in an effort to stop the tic.
Right now, there is a worry bigger and more urgent than Tristan. Mary’s husband, David, will descend on her any day and she is sure her guilt will shine through like a firefly in a jar. She will slip up somehow, maybe smell differently or perhaps refer to something only a woman in love would know. He will watch her and he will realise: his wife is an adulteress. When he came last, just over a year ago, she had started seeing Harris Jones outside of their nurse and patient relationship. Nothing more than long walks around the Jewish graveyard behind his house. A place safe from the prying eyes of others, somewhere they could be together to look at the bluebells and put the world to rights. An innocent friendship. But now, now things were so different.
‘Hot enough for you?’ the big ginger man who lives in her block asks as he stands outside the phone box, his glasses sitting lopsided across his babyish face. He is new to the area, one of those care-in-the-community patients. He runs his hands down the front of his T-shirt; it has a print of a young Elvis Presley on it, all hair and curled lip. When Mary first met David he was working as an Elvis impersonator at The Manila Peninsula Hotel. Mary hates Elvis. She smiles politely at the man as she spots the number 53 pulling into the bus stop.
She flashes her bus pass and rubs her arms discreetly against her polyester white uniform. The door closes behind her and traps in the heat and smells of the passengers. Mary thinks of how she is breaking the vows she took all those years ago in the local church with the baskets of sun-bleached plastic flowers and the priest with the lisp. She falls into that awkward middle seat at the back of the bus and feels the woman to her right tighten her grip on a battered library book so their arms don’t touch. Mary can just about make out the title: Broken Homes Make Broken Children. An omen? It’s like the world is conspiring to tell her something about her own wrongness, her dishonesty. But broken children? Her twins were hardly children anymore, thirty-five this year, and with careers and families of their own. Mary can’t imagine John’s or Julia’s life being affected by her having an affair or finally divorcing David. Divorce. As the word enters her mind the scratch becomes a searing itch and she tries to distract herself. She pulls a tissue from her bag and dabs her clammy face; the sun catches her wedding ring and it glints sadly, as if to mock her failure as a wife.
The bus picks up speed and a welcome breeze flows through the narrow windows. The woman with the cursed book gives Mary a sideways glance, their eyes meet and she adjusts herself to face out of the window. No one wants to deal with a crying nurse on public transport. As the bus nears Vanbrugh Close, Mary stands and presses the bell. She squeezes herself past the other sweaty passengers, towards the exit, ready to get off and face her second life. The doors hiss open and she steps into the full force of the sun. Immediately, her state of guilt gives way to something like joy, for although her affair is sordid and secret it is also satisfying, and her heart thumps with schoolgirl excitement at the prospect of seeing him again.
The walk towards the close of bungalows fills her with a feeling she remembers first having when she was nineteen and on the cusp of marrying David. A feeling she enjoys but knows she should not have in relation to a man other than her husband. Pop music plays from a stereo; a father and teenage daughter wash down a car together. They both glance up and smile at her. They look like a television advert: perfect and happy. On the other side of the road an elderly lady in a straw hat and pink gardening gloves picks at a blooming brood of hydrangeas. Vanbrugh Close is a world away from Nightingale Point and its smelly stairwell, blinking strip lights and cockroaches. And as Mary turns into the small neat drive of Harris’s home, she realises the life she has created with this man is a world away from herself, from the woman she has grown to be: the mother of two, grandmother of four, nurse of thirty-three years and wife to a fame-chasing husband.
She lies on the sofa listening to the neighbours’ argument as it sinks through the wall. The mother–daughter screaming matches have become an almost weekly occurrence, both of them going back and forth at each other in their matching catty voices. Pamela closes her eyes and imagines what it would feel like to scream and shout at Dad the way the girl next door does with her mum. Pamela could never; she would be too scared to say all the things she really thinks about him. She jumps at the sound of a door slamming in the neighbours’ flat, the sound that usually signals the end of the row. And now there’s nothing to distract her. She stretches each leg out above her head. She misses running so much. How long will this go on for?
On the train back from