I let her out of the coach. She looked up at me. ‘I just wish he hadn’t lied about his name.’

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘My husband.’

And then she was gone.

Twelve

Twelve

I didn’t drive towards the M1. I couldn’t face the motorway. Motorways batter you. I wanted a homely, my-sized road.

I drove south out of Spalding. My backside ached; my spine ached. I re-arranged Bernie’s cushion but it felt heavy now, as if it was filled with putty. Outside it was foggy. Trees loomed into the headlights and fell away.

Fathers would be coming home from work, now; doors closing. Jim would make the rounds of his empty trailers, looking through their windows. How many families had they kept safe, just for a short while? How many people were adrift, like me? Wives had told me things I shouldn’t hear; they told me because they would never see me again. I wondered if my mother had spoken to anybody, after she had wept; I wondered how many times she had wept and I had never seen. She didn’t pull up her jumper, like Shirley; she wasn’t the sort to show her scars. What can men do, to make women happy?

I wondered who the woman had been, on the beach, and who she had been calling. My dreams had become so strong, I couldn’t shake them off. Sometimes they rose up, like a belch, and I tasted a moment I had forgotten. Perhaps I was having a nervous breakdown. In my old life day had followed day and there were jobs to be done and things to be fixed. The week was pegged down by simple names like Bognor and Ramsgate and Luton. Roads unravelled in front of my steering wheel and I knew what I was going to find. I had kept my head down. A broken engine drew me like a magnet. Blistered woodwork called me; it beckoned me and my sander to keep us both busy, with no questions asked. Your whole life can be fists. And, in the moments over, there’s this woman in the house who you call your wife, who needs something from the few parts of you which she thinks she knows.

I had a son and we were playing on the beach. He lay fiat, squirming and giggling, as I heaped sand onto his legs. Soon they were like two plaster casts and he was trapped, all mine. Above us, gulls were blown about the sky, haranguing each other. There was a woman there; she had her back to us. I couldn’t see her face but I knew we were married, and we were happy.

My hands felt the sand; on top, powdery and warm; underneath, clogged. My son’s skin burnt in the sun, just like mine; I anointed him with Nivea. He wiped his nose with his gritty wrist. Helpless with love, I knelt beside him.

If.