A Dark Matter Episode 44

Hannah felt her other arm being grabbed by the uniformed cop and pulled behind her. She looked at the faces in front of her and tried to think of a time before all this, as the cop shoved her down the steps towards the police car.

Jenny

“Cheers.”

She smiled at Craig across the table. She was mad at herself for being here but it also felt comfortable.

She looked round the beer garden of The Pear Tree, full of students, leftover tourists and what she would have called crusties back in the day, not homeless exactly, but happy living on the edge of things.

There were a lot fewer crusties than there used to be, the subculture either moving on or disappearing altogether as the world became more uniform.

She turned back to Craig.

“What are we doing, Mr Mcnamara?” she said.

“Just having a drink, Ms Skelf.” He sipped his pint.

She drank from her double gin. “Really?” He bowed his head in mock reverence. “And I’m saying sorry by buying the drinks.” She shook her head.

After meeting Orla she’d wandered around Teviot and Southside wired from the lunchtime booze, soaking up the sun, watching the students.

In her head she was still Hannah’s age, but that delusion was busted every time she caught her reflection in a shop window. Walking amongst the energy of these kids, Hannah’s contemporaries, made her feel young again.

She’d sat in the Meadows, the grass still a little damp despite the sunshine, and watched young parents with toddlers in the play park.

So now she was the creepy middle-aged woman hanging around the play park.

She missed that time with Hannah, being needed. Larkin got it wrong, it wasn’t your parents who messed you up, it was your kids.

They need you for everything, make themselves the focus of your entire world, then the years slip away and they don’t need you anymore, and you have a gaping hole in your heart where your life used to be. And she didn’t even have a husband to share that emptiness with.

She’d walked back to the house and there was Craig standing at the front door, about to knock, with a beautiful orange orchid in his hand.

So here they were, drinking in the late afternoon as a wasp sniffed around the sticky rings their drinks had made on the table.

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” Jenny said. “I left early.”

“What about Fiona?”

“What about her?”

“The two of you work together, where did you say you were going?”

He frowned as if the question was stupid. “I told her I was coming to see you.” “Really?”

“We don’t keep secrets from each other.” As soon as he said it he looked sheepish. He and Fiona sure as hell kept their affair secret when he was still married to Jenny. He lifted his Stella to his lips to cover his embarrassment.

She couldn’t help it. “That must be nice for the two of you.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything.” She drank her gin, ice clacking against her teeth, the lime sharp on her lips.

“And why did you say you were coming to see me?”

A hard time

“To say sorry. I was an idiot on the phone the other night. You and Hannah are going through a hard time, I should have been more supportive.”

“Thank you.”

“I think it’s great you’re helping Dorothy, she must love having you close.”

“I hope so.”

“How is she coping?”

The truth was Jenny didn’t know how her mum was coping. The business with the money and Dad’s lies, and the Lawrence woman, what was that?

A diversion, something to focus on that wasn’t Jim’s death, or was it a real mystery to be solved? And the Glassman case, just another diversion?

Maybe life is just a succession of diversion tactics, moments to keep you busy, stop you thinking about the big stuff. But death brings the big stuff into focus. “She’s OK, considering.”

“And you?”

“Fine.”

“And Hannah?”

Jenny spotted two women Hannah’s age at a nearby table. They looked Scandinavian, good bone structure, blonde hair, tanned skin. She was aware Craig hadn’t looked at them, not even a glance.

Was he deliberately not looking or had he really not noticed? She was annoyed at herself for noticing he hadn’t noticed, which made her smile.

“Hannah is more sorted than any of us,” she said.

“True dat.” Craig’s tone was self-mocking, using a phrase too young for him. There was so much history between Craig and Jenny, so many in-jokes, insignificant knowledge that no one else shared with her.

That was the worst thing about divorce, not the separation or loneliness or stepping back into the swamp of dating, but the little shared quirks and foibles, the things that only one other person knew about you, the stuff that would be gone when you both died.

She thought “like tears in rain”, just like Rutger Hauer at the end of Blade Runner, and she knew Craig would get that reference.

They watched that movie lying in bed, eating chow mein, drinking some dreadful schnapps they’d picked up somewhere, quoting lines to each other and marvelling over Daryl Hannah’s hair and that other actor’s pockmarked face.

Craig smiled. “I don’t know how we managed to make such an amazing human between us.”

“They mess you up, your mum and dad.” He smiled in recognition. “We tried our best to do that, for sure.”

“Yet look how she turned out.”

A cloud flirted with the sun in the west.

The truth was Jenny didn’t know how her mum was coping. The business with the money and Dad’s lies, what was that?

More tomorrow.

A Dark Matter by Doug Johnstone is published by Orenda Books, as is Black Hearts, his latest in the same series. www.orendabooks.co.uk