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  ‘Oh, right.’ (Pause, breath.) ‘Well, anyway, that wann’t what I rang up for, I wanna talk about marriage and that.’

  ‘And – and what, sorry?’

  ‘Marriage and that. You don’ listen, do yer? Me boyfriend an’ me, we was gettin’ this flat together, right, but me parents, right, they said we was stupid.’

  ‘I see – they believe in marriage and, er, that?’

  ‘Yeah. I said to me dad the other day, you coulda killed summun an’ been let out by now.’

  ‘I’m . . . sorry?’

  ‘They ’ad their thirtieth weddin’ anniversary, an’ I said to me dad, you coulda killed summun an’ been let out by now.’

  ‘Light dawns, Kelly. I see what you mean. You’re referring to that old adage – marriage isn’t a word, it’s a sentence.’

  ‘. . .?’

  ‘Kelly?’

  ‘Yeah. An’, well, me parents think we’re stupid.’

  ‘How unkind. And have they offered any kind of substantiating evidence for this claim?’

  ‘. . . Uh?’

  ‘Er, why do they say that? About you and your boyfriend?’

  ‘Dunno. He ain’t me boyfriend now. Weren’t really me boyfriend, anyway. I dinn’t really like him, like. I wanna marry someone rich, me. Rich an’ good-lookin’, right?’

  ‘I . . . see. And you’re looking around, er, Chatham?’

  ‘Live in Cha ’am, yeah.’

  ‘I was just trying to suggest, you see, Kelly – I’m sorry, it’s this irony thing, really, and maybe it’s my fault for not having explained the concept adequately – I was just trying to suggest that you should expand your horizons a little?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘OK, Kelly, good luck with it. Thanks for your call, I’ll speak to you soon.’

  I’m not really listening. I want to make that clear. The presenter annoys me with his personal approach to censorship. I called them up once, but when the person taking the calls found out that I wanted to advocate castrating paedophiles, they wouldn’t let me on the air. Said it would cause too much offence. Well, who decides what causes offence and what doesn’t? They let stupid tossers come on and cause offence with their low IQs, don’t they? I’m definitely going to start a campaign against passive listening-to-bollocks.

  They cut someone off last week who said he supported the BNP. This made him look important enough to be censored. If they’d just let him carry on speaking, he’d have shown himself up as a dickhead, with no effort required.

  Of course, all the BNP have to do, if they want respectability, is not beat anyone up for say, three months, then declare a ‘ceasefire’ (without handing over any weapons as such) and within a few weeks they’ll be shaking hands with presidents and government ministers. And if the arms fund is a bit low, their new friends will surely oblige.

  Anyway, as I say, I’m not listening. I’m thinking about this morning, when I went to see Marcie.

  *

  Now, the autumn days seem to be coated with mush, sheened by drizzle. The light has the greyness of eternal twilight. As I hurry through the town, shivering in my coat, cars sweep past, lights scattering in puddles at half-past three in the afternoon. Sunlight is a concept we made up. Days are becoming squashed in the middle by great clouds of blackness as we’re squeezed towards winter.

  I’ve heard Marcie is pissed-off. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her properly happy – just drunk. Of course, the American for angry is ‘pissed’, which no doubt causes a little confusion. (‘Gee, you guys, I came home drunk from the high-school prom. My mom was real pissed.’)

  I digress. They say misery loves company – well, not from where I stand. Not unless the company is fully-privatized, run by a quango and makes home-brew depression kits. Producing whines by fomenting gripes.

  No, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to. I’ve got other fish to batter. They say ‘other cats to whip’ in France, did you know that? Gives you some idea what their minds are on.

  The metal staircase up to her flat is dusty. Dust hangs in the air, too. The air’s got a thick, gritty quality.

  Marcie doesn’t come to the door straight away. There’s a lot of thumping and scratching from the other side of the door, and a pattering like the paws of an animal. I’m curious. I put my ear up to the door, smelling its warm, painty odour. Then the door clicks and I straighten up just in time as it opens.

  Those bashed-looking eyes are there, flicking up and down.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘It’s you.’

  I shrug. Not much of an answer you can give to that, is there? ‘Can I come in, then?’

  Marcie’s eyes flick over her shoulder for a moment, as if she is checking something inside the flat.

  ‘I can come back later,’ I tell her, and my heart is beating faster with the excited thought that I might be able to put off this meeting.

  ‘I’m decorating,’ Marcie says. ‘Mind the paint.’

  I step inside the hall. There is a strong odour of paint and paste. It’s a smell of transience, but also a slightly fishy, spermy smell.

  There’s a patch of pinkish granules on the carpet just inside the hall, next to the bedroom door. I narrowly avoid stepping in it. I realize after a few seconds that it’s a pile of salt, soaking up a red-wine stain.

  Marcie, in a silver dressing-gown, slinks down the hallway with a cigarette in each hand. There are small flecks of paint on the shimmery surface of the gown. I follow her, tasting the sharpness of her smoke, not quite sure where I’m going.

  She lurches up against a door, making me stop short, and lazily says to someone inside the room, ‘Amuse yourself. Got a visitor.’

  I manage to peer through the door, where the intoxicating smell of paint is stronger than ever. The room’s covered in cloths and strewn with great swathes of green wallpaper, like sloughed-off skin, and there’s a man, naked, perched on a stepladder.

  Or at least, he is until Marcie’s words ‘Got a visitor’ echo round the room, and my inquisitive little head pokes itself round the door. Now, all of a sudden, with a most un-masculine shriek, he’s grabbed one of the huge snakeskins of wallpaper. He’s wrapping himself up in it, trying not to look at me.

  I smile at him. ‘Hi.’

  He’s blushing, trying to blend with the wall.

  ‘Have you got her for free?’ I ask him in mock surprise. ‘Make the most of it while stocks last.’

  *

  The next caller after Kelly is Andy, who served in Northern Ireland. He’s talking about gays in the forces. I sharpen my pencil while I listen to him. The fragments make a perfect, thin roll of wood like the peel of some wooden fruit.

  ‘Now, Andy, surely it doesn’t matter? You’re all in together, comrades in arms and all that. Why should it matter?’

  ‘Yeah, right, you’re all in together, yeah, but you have to trust the other lads. Sometimes it’s quite normal, when you’re out on trainin’ exercises an’ that, to huddle together, like, y’ know, nothin’ funny about it, jus’ for warmth and that. At night.’

  ‘And if someone you huddled up with later confessed to you to being homosexual, you would feel uneasy about this?’

  ‘Too f-flippin’ right I would.’

  ‘What would you do?’

  ‘I’d prob’ly punch his lights out.’

  I finish sharpening my pencil. Just for fun, I start digging the point into the flesh of my arm. I wonder if you could do a home-made tattoo in sharp pencil?

  Listening to this verbal ping-pong, I suddenly get a picture of JJ’s Aunt Imelda in a flak jacket, with a beret over her short back and sides, mud foundation smeared on her perfect alabaster face, lying in a ditch and waiting for her target to come over the hill. Actually, I think she’d look quite good in fatigues.

  ‘Yeah, but I mean it, right? You ’ave to trust the other blokes.’

  ‘And you’d feel you couldn’t trust someone, simply because they happened to enjoy a different kind of relationship from you? Do you i
magine that there haven’t been gays in the military in the past? T. E. Lawrence was gay. Did you know that?’

  ‘Yeah . . . well, he were a f-flippin’ perv, weren’t he? We did one of them books in school. Obsessed with sex, he was.’

  ‘Er, yes – Andy, I rather feel you’re confusing him with D. H. Lawrence, who’s another kettle of fish entirely. Well, never mind.’

  Is it just me, or is everyone obsessed with it? From the point of view of orientation, I mean? Generally speaking, it’s the last thing I need to know about someone when I meet them. Unless I fancy them, that is. Sure, if JJ had preferred blokes it would have made a difference to me, ’cos I wanted him.

  But I don’t actually need to know what his Aunt Imelda prefers, and yet as soon as I met her, she thought she had to make it clear. (Why? In case I felt like jumping her bones?) Just get on with doing it, that’s what I say – don’t waste time bragging about it. Otherwise I have this fear that pretty soon, I’m going to feel this perverse need to walk up to a complete stranger at a party and say, ‘Hi, I’m Bel. I get off on crucifixion fantasies. Is that a hammer in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?’

  I get bored with the pencil. It’s not as easy to break my skin as I thought.

  Anyway, after this morning with Marcie, I’ve got an important decision to make.

  *

  Marcie is in the kitchen. She’s pushing her paint-streaked hair back with one hand and shoving the plunger of a cafetière down with the other.

  How refreshingly middle-class. Yeah, irony. Marcie, just a year ago, would have made a cup of coffee by turning the hot tap straight on to Happy Shopper granules in a chipped mug. How she’s changed. The saddest kind of social climber, isn’t it? One who’s actually trying to be bourgeois? I’ve always thought of middle-classness as something you can’t really help – like being ginger, or having buck teeth.

  Shame the effect’s ruined by her two burning ciggies, parked in a lump of putty on the worktop.

  She opens the fridge to get the milk and I get a glimpse of something odd. Nestling there among all the butter and beer and cheese and an iceberg lettuce, there’s about a dozen stoppered little bottles, all labelled. They look like those bottles of milk that we used in school when we did that pasteurizing experiment. I’m a bit uneasy about home-sterilized milk, but no, the stuff that Marcie’s got out is an ordinary supermarket carton. What’s all that in the fridge, then? She closes the door. So I have to ask something different.

  ‘Is he . . .?’ I venture, waving a hand down the corridor.

  She looks up at me, or rather past me. I realize she’s tuned-out, this early in the day. ‘Fuckin’ decorator. Bit of all right. So I thought, what the hell.’

  I have a worrying feeling about this. ‘This wouldn’t have anything to do with payment in lieu, would it?’

  She looks up from pouring the coffee. I hate that stoned gaze, looking right through me like blind beggar’s eyes.

  ‘Lounge,’ she says. ‘Not the loo.’

  Cascades of thick, brown coffee are trickling across the worktop, down the cupboards and on to the floor. Some of it splashes on Marcie’s naked leg, and she doesn’t even seem to feel it – but then she shrieks when she sees what she’s done. She drops the cafetière and it rolls to the edge of the worktop and smashes. Marcie’s mouth opens in a silent scream and she puts her hands to her face.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I’m saying. ‘Don’t worry.’ I start wiping up with a cloth – would you believe it? I’m clearing up, taking control. I wrap up the bits of glass in an old newspaper and put them in the bin. ‘Don’t worry,’ I keep saying. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  I have to keep saying that, because I know that when you’re stoned it does matter, something like that matters a great deal, unless you think it’s hilarious. It’s like when you’ve been seriously weeding all night and you want something to eat, need something to eat, and you go to the bar to buy a pastie or something and it’s absolutely vital that you show the barman that you know what you are doing, that you are not a useless stoned idiot, by having the totally correct change. And you fumble through piles and piles of coppers and those trinkety little Mickey Mouse fives and tens, and you start to understand what the old biddies are going on about when they say coins are so fiddly nowadays.

  I sit Marcie down at the kitchen table, grip her shoulders and shake her. Blonde hair falls in a scrappy fringe over her deep, dark eyes.

  ‘Listen, Marcie,’ I say to her, sounding stern now. I sound like my mother. Jesus H. Christ, on a Harley-Davidson. ‘What I mean is – are you letting him shag you to pay for your lounge to be decorated?’

  She bites her lip, looks away as if seeking the answer on the wet tiles of the kitchen floor. Then she shrugs. Nods.

  I lean back, exhaling deeply. She is such a stupid slut. I’ve always said so. Why is it up to me to get her out of this mess? I don’t even know her properly, for Christ’s sake.

  Why’s Damien not here? I don’t want to answer that.

  ‘Tell me about what you want to do.’ I realize I’ve asked her, now, and that there is no going back. ‘Tell me about wanting to take the blame for the shop-window.’

  She looks up at me with those haunted eyes. ‘I need the money, don’t I? Need it bad.’

  ‘What do you need the money for, Marcie? You’ve got a job.’

  Silence. She bites her lip, plucks one of the cigarettes out of its putty and draws deeply on it. I watch the ash glowing, hanging on the edge, wondering if it will fall off. I realize what has happened.

  ‘You . . . haven’t got a job any more? Have you, Marcie?’

  She won’t look at me. ‘Shit job anyway. Get something better, I will.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, sure you will.’ I lean back in the chair. Well, that’s taken the wind out of my sales pitch. ‘What happened, Marcie?’

  ‘I was off. Ill. For a day.’ She pushes her hair back, and I see her fingernails, varnished with flecks of white paint. ‘Just a day.’

  ‘Ill? When?’

  ‘Well, hung-over. Same as ill, innit? Anyway, they got a temp in.’ She reaches for the other cigarette now, smoking double-barrelled. (I’m quite impressed. I’ve never actually seen anyone desperate enough to do that before.) ‘She was this bitch straight out of seccy college in Canterbury. They decided to keep her. Instead of me.’

  I am stunned. I really thought Marcie was on the way up, or what she saw as up. Now, in the snakes-and-ladders economy, down she goes.

  ‘What was she so good at?’ As I ask, I can imagine a few things. More words per minute, or more adept at the hieroglyphs of shorthand perhaps, or a firebrand in the filing department.

  ‘Telling the truth,’ says Marcie absently, leaning back in her chair and not looking at me. She shrugs, scattering two sprays of ash. ‘She told them about me. About me past.’

  ‘They . . . didn’t know, then?’

  ‘One or two people knew. But they didn’t say nothin’, ’cos they couldn’t prove it. But she didn’t care, she just said something outright.’ Marcie leans forward, and her breathing is ragged. ‘I need the money, Bel. I really need it now.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ I hold up my hands. ‘Let’s think carefully about this. You were too busy getting smashed, so you may not have noticed, but there’s nothing at the moment to connect us with putting that car through Goodmans’ window. Right?’

  ‘Except JJ an’ his Dettol,’ she says.

  Coolly, she stubs out both her cigarettes together, and the trails of smoke frame her face in a V. I can’t believe her, sometimes. Maybe Marcie isn’t as stupid as she’s always seemed.

  ‘OK. So they find that the car smells of Dettol – because you vommed inside it, I would point out. What do they do then? Go round all the chemists, asking if anyone was seen buying Dettol in the small hours on Saturday night?’

  Marcie shrugs. ‘Yes,’ she says, simply.

  ‘What?’ I sound more cross than I intend. Probably be
cause I’ve realized, with sudden, crashing clarity, that she’s right.

  She shrugs again. ‘I know the police,’ she says. ‘That’s how they work.’ She leans forward, looking into my eyes with deep urgency. ‘Look, Bel, I ain’t totally stupid, right? I’m not goin’ to go blabbin’ off to people if nothin’ comes of it, am I? You pay me for security. If anyone asks any questions, and if they start to link it to us, I’ll say I was the driver. For fifty quid.’

  ‘Fifty. Right.’ So, she’s mentioned a sum, now. That’s the price of truth, is it? I briefly wonder – and I have to bite my tongue to stop myself from asking – what it used to buy from Marcie, before. Would it have bought the full job, or what I believe they call ‘hand relief’? To be honest, it’s not as much as I thought she might have asked for.

  ‘An’ the expenses, of course,’ she says.

  ‘Expenses?’

  ‘The fine and the costs, if there are any. You agree to pay if it comes to that. It’s part of the price of your non-involvement.’

  I’m starting to get the picture. ‘You wouldn’t just say you were driving – you’d leave me and JJ out of the picture totally?’

  She shrugs. She fumbles with her lighter. It’s a tacky little thing, like a tree decoration or something. Not what I’d call a lighter.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Totally.’

  Her eyes flick up to me, down, up again. I’m leaning back in my chair, watching her closely.

  ‘I’m just not sure, Marcie.’ Trying to be honest with her.

  ‘Please, Bel,’ she says.

  I decide it is probably a good time to go, just in case she starts begging with me to give her the money anyway. ‘I’ll let you know,’ I tell her.

  On the way out, I poke my head round the lounge door again. ‘Get your brush out, mate. Happy pasting.’

  *

  Even on the bus, I can’t get the smell of paint out of my nostrils.

  Behind me, as we pull away from the town, a giant cloud looms over the harbour. It’s like a big V-sign at me, written in smoke. As if the Town at the Edge of the World is saying, Stuff You.