The Girls Beneath - Ross Armstrong A Tom Mondrian Story

Скачать книгу

a renewed push for intimacy in the air. Not that she fears my close proximity; we’ve remained very intimate, in all ways but one. And I’m told that’s a bit of a thing with relationships after a while.

      ‘They said that if I’d scored any lower they’d have had to declare me legally blind.’

      She laughs, somewhat nervously, I think.

      ‘Although he said that some blind people have scored very well on these tests, so that’s probably unfair on them.’

      As she laughs, I realise I don’t have to tell her anything about my personality. She’s the person who knows me better than any other. Who has been witness to my best and worst emotions. This is the being that I had picked above any other to eat with and sleep next to, the one person whose hair it is vaguely permissible to randomly stroke and smell, who has looked at my face over the past six years a good deal more than I’ve had to myself. She knows me from the tiniest colour in my eyes to the softest things I’ve ever said. I reach down into my pocket.

      ‘You’re just… I’d say your personality is… doughy.’

      ‘Sorry what?’ I say.

      ‘Doughy. Just a lovely, happy, doughy man.’

      ‘Kind of sounds like you’re saying my personality is fat.’

      ‘No, you’re not fat,’ she says.

      ‘No, I know I’m not,’ I say, vocally straining.

      ‘I mean, soft. Lovely. Like bread.’

      Our eyes lock and she withdraws her hands, as if thinking four moves ahead and wanting no part of what comes next.

      We turn and look up at the fake stars in a silence that turns over many times. It has endless pockets where it feels like one of us may speak. It runs on and on until at one point it has a little hate in it and at another a delicacy so fragile that it would shatter if you were to reach out and touch it.

      Then I feel something. One of the tiny stars has fallen and is resting on my thigh. Then Anita looks down at it and finds a look somewhere between care worker and executioner. As she tells me that she’s been doing it with Gary Canning in the staff room after school for a term and a half. Her back against the pigeonholes. Her pencil skirt hitched up.

      She doesn’t say all of that of course, but that’s what I hear. I want to be angry and after she leaves I do a lot of pacing and fist clenching as I examine Gary Canning’s social media output. I’m not really the sort of guy who raises his voice. I’m naturally better with compassion than passion, I suppose, and it’s not good to force these things. And she’s my best friend. It’s hard to be angry with your best friend with tears in her eyes.

      The fact that she’s already arranged to stay with a friend leaves me logistically as well as emotionally lonely. But I’m always good with my own company and nothing if not resilient. Although resilient isn’t the word she used in the only moments of our conversation that bordered on unkind. Something about ‘ambition’, I don’t know. I log onto a gaming community as my heart pounds away further back in the mix.

      The last time my heart pumped so hard, was during a training session with a self-defence specialist. I made myself a dead-weight to prove the demonstrator couldn’t lift me and the next thing I knew we were both on the matted ground, him with his knee poised over my chest, having dug it into me as we fell together. I gasped for breath as I looked up at the crowd of faces who leant over me. I hadn’t been so vulnerable since I was a child. And here I am again.

      I met Anita at the party of a university friend I was already making plans to see less. I was pretending to be a smoker, and doing it pretty badly, as an excuse to not be inside with some awful people. Passable on their own, the flat was small and the men in particular were drunk and brash, which was a potion that ensured we were both having a terrible time. She spotted me coughing on a light cigarette, like a child taking it as a punishment, and we quickly decided that as we both hated smoking we should persevere together, mostly to stay away from the noise and fury of fellow twenty-two year olds newly arrived in London and convincing themselves they were ‘cool bro’, and having a ‘wicked time’. Batting away my cynicism on a cluster of topics, she made me laugh more than anyone had in my three years as an undergraduate and when it rained we sheltered under a tree and stayed until the last drops from the fern tumbled into the mud below our huddled bodies.

      I want the days after she leaves to be the kind of textbook break up weekend I’ve always heard about, comprised of time spent in my pants and regular doses of alcohol, but that’s a little too close to the norm for comfort. So instead, I run, racking up 15k the day after she leaves and double that on the day after. Getting fit again has been one of the pleasures of the training process, but today I am running just to run. A picture show clicks on through my head with every thud that my feet beat on the tarmac. Each sting observed and recognised. I look out on the streets and streets that pass and see little of interest, which is at least in perfect keeping with the training officer’s perception of my observation skills, and Anita’s of my consistency. Somewhere in the distance, Gary Canning rests his back against the pigeonholes and doesn’t even laugh. He breathes deep and leans, blissfully unaware of me, and thinks of India.

      I reflect on this as I reach into the pocket of the jeans I was wearing the night she left. I may never be praised for my instinct, I think to myself, as I look at the tiny box in front of me. The one my father had pulled out in front of my mother in far more romantic surroundings many years earlier, under real stars, under the lights of Paris.

      I think about my sense of timing, as I examine the little diamond before me. And as I wipe my eyes with my index finger and thumb, I laugh.

       ‘You’re my little one

       Say I didn’t love in vain

       Please quit crying honey

       Cos it sounds like a hurricane’

      It’s one degree below freezing on Seven Sisters Road but I’m not complaining. The first thing officers have to combat is the weather. Christmas is three weeks away and snow has settled, shrouding Tottenham in a crisp white blanket. Towelling it up like a baby after a bath. Hugging it close and singing it a lullaby.

      I breathe into my gloved hands and watch the cloud stream onto them and then up into the slate coloured sky. If you don’t like being out on the street, then try another profession. It’s our job to know our neighbourhood, which means mostly being out on foot or on your bike. Fortunately for me I’ve got one advantage. I know these roads like the back of my arse. I’ve lived here most of my life.

      I’ve watched corner-shop keepers get older and kids I went to school with become upstanding members of the community or, more frequently, go the other way. I’ve seen their little brothers, once new born babies who held on tightly to my finger in their mother’s arms, grow up to get their very own ASBOs. I’ve given them out myself.

      Or rather ABCs, the ASBO is the last resort before criminal charges are brought. An ABC comes before that.

      That’s my first act on my first day, Monday at 10.10 a.m. Drawing up an Acceptable Behaviour Contract for my schoolmate Dom Minton’s half-brother, Eli. He’ll probably be the last kid around here to get one, as they’re soon to become defunct, so I suppose you could say this is a bit of a Kodak moment.

      Eli has a birthmark that wine-stains the top left hand side of his face and I feel sorry for the kid. School is hard enough without the kind of stares it must bring.

      I take advice from my sergeant on it all. I look at Eli’s case notes and write down a few of his greatest hits. Then I ask if he would agree to the reasonable suggestion that he should’ve thought better of them.

      The severity of his list of misdemeanours escalates sharply. Something dark in me struggles not to laugh when I glance at them over his shoulder as he reads:

Скачать книгу