Thirteen

It was a fish and chip shop. Closed. Not surprising, really, at 3.30 in the morning.

I was parked opposite. I gazed at it, through the sodium street lighting, and tears trickled down my cheeks. After four days I had caught Butler’s cold; or maybe I’d got it from that dog, years and years ago, when I’d stood in Ardley Street. Kleenexes lay like blossoms around my feet.

Every mile, I’d been growing angrier. My nose was blocked and I was spoiling for a fight. How could this Barry dump my son in a trailer, surrounded by fog and pornographic literature? What sort of an example did he set, having it away with his landlady in front of a growing lad? Lesley was included in this irritation, for putting up with it. She’d never have let me get away with anything like that. Once, in a garage, I’d paused in front of a pin-up calendar and she had lectured me for hours. In my flat one day she’d felt the earth in my rubber-plant pot, pronounced it dry and accused me of insensitivity towards growing things. The nerve of it, when she was carrying my child. She flashed across my memory, bundled up like a Mongolian peasant and hectoring me about her needs. I couldn’t believe I’d once been fond of her.

They obviously didn’t live here. To tell the truth, I hadn’t expected them to. This Barry was a slippery customer, him and his chest hair, and he’d probably given a false address. Why he deserved to keep his daughter, God and Lesley only knew. I had given up expecting things to be fair. Actually, I’d given up on my own son. I was getting the flu; my bones ached.

Above the shop was a pair of dirty windows saying SOLICITORS: COMMIS IONERS FO OATHS, with two of the letters gone. The floor above that looked derelict. It was a small street, dwarfed, beyond the rooftops, by a Texas Homecare store. Little care had been lavished on these homes, in fact half the street was boarded up. If they had ever lived here—and I couldn’t imagine Lesley frying fish—they had long ago packed up and gone. Everyone had gone: to Tenerife, to Sydney. To here and there. To somewhere else. I hadn’t even bothered to get out of my coach.

Somewhere, far off, a dog was barking. It went on and on like that baby did, the baby I never saw again in the Bed and Breakfast. A police car slid past the end of the street, paused, and slid out of sight. It was the dead middle of the night and I was freezing.