Fatlands Page 2

  You know what they say about the past being another country. Well, for this one you’d need a visa. She was fourteen going on twenty-four. Tall, maybe five-five or five-six already, with a mane of dark hair caught up in one of those frou-frou elastic velveteen bands that were all the rage. Her clothes—skirt and sweater—were smart, veering towards well groomed, the kind of garments where the label told you more than the washing instructions. Mattie Shepherd—self-possession on legs, and a nice line in Lycra tights. Just what I wanted most for my weekend—a day in the company of a budding Harvey Nichols buyer. But while the clothes gave off one message, the scowl gave off another.

  I put out my hand—the better to keep her at arm’s length. ‘Hello,’ I said cheerfully. ‘You must be Mattie.’ Nice one, Hannah. Narrative and smarm all in one.

  She regarded me as one might regard a lump of bird shit. Hard to know what had disgusted her most, my face or my personality. Then, murmuring what was obviously an obligatory ‘good morning’ in the general direction of Miss—sorry, Mrs—Parkin, she sailed straight past me and out the door into the morning sunshine.

  I watched her go, that neat little butt shimmying across the tiled floor. I thought of the money. And suddenly it didn’t seem so generous. Mrs Parkin took pity on my outstretched hand. Her face had just the ghost of a smile as she pumped my fingers and said briskly, ‘Well, have a wonderful day. Please give my regards to Mattie’s father. Tell him she’s doing fine and we’ll look forward to seeing him next time.’ Then she stood and watched as I followed my charge out to the car.

  At least she had the grace to wait by the passenger door. I looked at her snarling little face over the roof of the car, and I have to say it played into all my worst prejudices. ‘The name is Hannah,’ I said with an accent plucked from the playground of a South London comprehensive. ‘And I just want you to know I’m looking forward to this every bit as much as you are.’

  The scowl got bigger. I unlocked the car and we both got in. I strapped on my seatbelt and put the key in the ignition. She didn’t move. ‘I think you’d better put on your belt, sweetheart. It’s going to be a long drive.’

  She was staring out through the windscreen, as if she hadn’t heard me. I waited, counting to ten silently. Out through the corner of my eye I saw Mrs Parkin come out on to the front steps, getting ready to wave. Five thousand pounds a year and they can’t even get them to put on their seatbelts. Somebody should tell their parents. I started the engine, moved into first, then hit the accelerator at the same time as I released the clutch. The car shot forward, flinging us both back against the seats. Then I hit the brake. The seatbelt bit into my chest. She stuck out her hands against the dashboard, but she was still winded enough to let out a cry.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said with genuine gaiety.

  She shot me a glance of pure malice, then pulled the belt off its hook. This time, at normal speed, I executed a swift three-point turn and headed for the front gates. In the back mirror I saw Mrs Parkin standing, a trifl e anxiously, on the gravel. I gave her a cheery wave. Eight o’clock to five-thirty. Nine and a half sodding hours. Just you wait, Frank Comfort. I’ll get you for this.

  CHAPTER TWO Sweet Little Fourteen

  The first hour was pure murder. But then, as a private detective, it’s my job to get a perverted pleasure out of that kind of thing.

  Beside me the Harvey Nichols trainee was fast turning into a bit of a slob. She had arranged herself extravagantly on the front seat, one leg tucked up underneath the other, skirt halfway to her crotch, head back against the headrest as if the world outside was just too boring to warrant her attention. Mind you, she had a point. As we passed, Debringham High Street was tarting itself up ready for business. A classy collection of retail outlets they were, too: a couple of antique shops, an auction house, and a book shop with a display of Dorothy Dun-nett and Kingsley Amis in the window (now there’s one for Blind Date, Cilla). Just the kind of place to drive teenagers into solvent abuse. If, that was, they were allowed to use their tuck money outside school grounds. I wondered if it was worth letting off a small salvo in the hope of attracting a conversation.

  ‘Picturesque little place,’ I said with what I felt to be well-judged irony. ‘Do they let you out?’

  She humphed a bit, then said, ‘Saturday mornings and Sunday afternoons.’

  ‘What d’you do?’

  ‘Shoplift.’

  The remark came out gin-dry. I found it genuinely funny but thought it wiser to suppress my admiration. I stopped to let an old lady with an old dog cross the road. The dog was moving slower than she was. It was not a life-enhancing sight. ‘Do I gather you don’t like it here?’

  ‘It’s a dung heap.’

  I thought of Mrs Parkin’s sensible shoes and the bill that must come flying through her father’s letter box every term. ‘But an expensive one.’

  She snorted. ‘He can afford it.’

  ‘You’re sure about that, are you?’

  We were on the outskirts of the town now, the smart thatched cottages giving way to open land, rich rolling fields with early sunlight playing across them. Big farms. I wondered what they grew. But then in my experience the country is always a mystery to girls born in Hammersmith. There didn’t seem much point in asking Mattie, since whatever she was looking at it wasn’t the countryside. Instead she had her head halfway inside her voluminous shoulder bag, rummaging frantically. She came up triumphant, an unopened packet of Dunhill cigarettes in one hand and a cute little Bic lighter in the other. Bedside me the cellophane crinkled and a flame licked up. I cleared my throat loudly.

  It’s a difficult one, smoking. I mean all the best PIs hurtle towards death in a wreath of cigarette smoke, and I’d certainly paid my dues to that myth for long enough. But then I met a man who couldn’t stand the smell and I surrendered to lust. It would make a better story if it had taken six months of nicotine patches and Mars bars. As it turned out I wasn’t quite the addictive personality I had thought. For him or the cigarettes. So I let them both go together. And, yes, my teeth do shine more in the dark, which just means I have to keep my mouth closed on night jobs. It also means that now, of course, I have all the tolerance of the converted. I coughed again. She held out the packet.

  ‘Filthy habit, isn’t it?’she said tartly. ‘D’ you want one?’

  I thought of the litany of horrors one should recite to an adolescent about smoking. ‘No.’ Worth a try? ‘And neither do you.’

  ‘It’s my body,’she growled, still at the stage when death is preferable to reaching thirty.

  ‘But it’s my car,’ I said sweetly. ‘And I’m asthmatic. Cigarette smoke brings on fits.’

  She stared at me, and you could see she didn’t believe me but wasn’t sure how to call my bluff. With bad grace she stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray, then carefully pushed it back into the packet. And suddenly I was fourteen all over again. ‘However,’ I said ‘there’s some dope in the glove compartment if you want to roll a joint. I haven’t had one all morning.’

  I watched while her eyes widened. With the creases temporarily gone, her face was almost pretty: skin like a fat peach, mercifully untroubled by acne, and what looked like good bones lurking underneath the puppy flesh. She was going to turn some heads soon. If she hadn’t done so already. She hesitated, then leant forward and snapped open the little flag. An A-Z exploded out into her lap. In the mess that remained we both saw a mound of tapes, the odd McDonald’s wrapping and a couple of packets of gum. I put out a hand and rummaged a little deeper, then said softly, ‘Damn, I must have left it at home. Want some gum?’

  She shook her head and scowled again. We were getting nowhere fast. I opted for confrontation.

  ‘You know, Mattie, we’re going to be in each other’s company for the next eight hours at least. Either you can be more polite or I can be less. It makes no difference to me. I want to be here about as much as you do.’

  The face stayed thunder, but the eyes sparked a little i
nterest. ‘So why did you take the job?’

  ‘Because of the money.’

  ‘He’s paying you a lot, is he?’

  ‘More than it’s worth,’ I said bluntly. ‘Except now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Yeah,’she smiled bitterly. ‘That’s my father, all right.’

  I let a beat of a pause go by. ‘Like him a lot, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember what he looks like.’

  ‘How about your mum?’

  She shot me a dark look. ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘Nothing. Except that she’s out to get you back.’

  She snorted. ‘If she wanted me back, then she wouldn’t have left me in the first place, would she?’

  And there was genuine pain in her voice this time. That’s the trouble with being fourteen. You want people to treat you like an adult, then when they do it hurts too much. I let it be. She sat with her face away from me, looking out. We drove on in silence. Then she put her hand out and angrily took a piece of gum. After she had unwrapped it, she thought long and hard about throwing the paper on to the floor, but in the end stuffed it in the overfl owing ashtray. I was more pleased than I allowed myself to show. Or maybe I showed it more than I thought.

  Ahead of us the A303 announced its intention to turn into the M3 with no service stations for twenty-three miles. We both watched the sign and the last service station whip past. It was ninety seconds later she said she needed to stop for a pee. Great. Always guard against complacency, Hannah, Frank said smugly in my ear, it’s not in the bag till it’s in the bag.

  ‘Tough,’ I said, to both of them. ‘You’ll have to wait.’ My turn to sulk.

  By the time we reached the service station we were in zero temperature again. She got out of the car before I’d properly stopped, pulling her bag with her, and flounced across the forecourt towards the entrance. I watched her go. It would, I decided, be an act of overt aggression to follow her into the Ladies and stand guard at the loo door. There are some places where even a chaperone doesn’t go. On the other hand I was being paid way too much money to be just a chaperone. I waited till she’d disappeared through the main entrance then got out of the car.

  By the time I got there she wasn’t in the loo, or at least none of the ones that were open. I called her name. No answer. She wasn’t buying more cigarettes and she wasn’t making a phone call. Neither was she having an overpriced cup of coffee. That left the bridge to the other side of the motorway.

  I didn’t run, but I didn’t exactly walk, either. I love those bridges, concrete corridors going nowhere. I’ve always wanted to have a last-reel shoot-out in one of them, bullets ricocheting while innocent passersby dive for cover. Either that or me flinging myself through the plate-glass windows on to the back of a passing truck underneath. Alas, today was yet another day when I didn’t get to fulfil my ambitions.

  Neither did I get to find my client. Either she wasn’t there or she’d already left. I hoofed it back to the east side. From the entrance to the forecourt I saw a figure standing next to the car. She didn’t look anything like Mattie, but what the hell …

  At least she had the grace to be shifty about it. Though, to be honest, it wasn’t her face I was concentrating on. I have to say it suited her better: the tattered leggings with the money belt around the waist, the T-shirt under the sharp little leather jacket and the hair piled high like a black fountain frozen in mid-flow. I had a vision of that nicely pressed Jaeger skirt all scrunched up in the bottom of her bag, but I couldn’t summon up any pity for it. She looked—well, she looked more herself.

  She stood waiting for my disapproval. I stared at her and saw myself aged fourteen, hair like a sheepdog, miniskirt barely covering my knickers and a long string of beads undulating over lumpy teenage breasts: just another suburban rebel desperate to catch up with the sixties when the decade was already over. In retrospect it had been less about fashion than identity. And I had thought I was so wonderful. It still comes as a shock when I look back at the pictures and see myself as overweight jailbait. Now those would be a set of negatives to kill for.

  She was still waiting. I tried to take it seriously. The generation gap demanded it. But I just couldn’t do it. I looked her up and down and shook my head. ‘You look great. Let’s hope your temper improves with your appearance. Shall we go?’ And she gave me just the smallest of smiles.

  Back in the car we were Thelma and Louise. She strapped on her seatbelt and hit the glove compartment. For a second I thought we might be back to the dope, but instead she had her hands full of tapes, making an instant inventory of the music. I’d seen people more impressed by my taste. She took her time. We were already in the fast lane when she said,

  ‘Who’s Bob Seger?’

  ‘He used to play back-up to Frank Sinatra,’ I said solemnly. ‘Go on, give it a try.’

  She slid the tape in and I turned on the stereo, loud. The opening chords of ‘Blow Me Away’ lifted the car about an inch and a half off the ground. And this time the grin reached her ears. Rock ’n’ roll. Bringing the world together.

  We hit the rest of the gum and moved towards family matters via education, on which we had similar views, albeit for different reasons.

  ‘They’re just stupid most of them. They’re so young, even the older ones. Half of them are still slobbering over Jason Donovan.’

  ‘Jason doesn’t do much for you, then?’

  ‘God, do me a favour.’

  ‘How long have you been there?’

  ‘One hundred and ninety-six days,’she said immediately. ‘Not including holidays.’

  ‘If you hate it so much, why don’t you ask your father to take you away?’

  ‘Because he wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘Have you tried?’she scowled, which was her way of telling me the question wasn’t worth answering. ‘So where did you go before?’

  ‘A place in Suffolk. Then when we came to London, a day school in Acton. That was OK. At least you could get away from it.’

  ‘But then your mum left and he felt he couldn’t cope, was that it?’she chewed on her cheek. ‘Maybe he thought it was best for you.’

  ‘Well, then he was wrong, wasn’t he?’she snapped back. ‘But he doesn’t care. As long as he’s got his rats to play with.’

  ‘What does he do?’ Because she obviously wanted to tell me.

  ‘He’s a scientist. Trying to cure the world of cancer.’ And although she spat it out, you could feel how it had been a thing of pride not so long ago.

  ‘But not so good with his own family, eh?’ I let it sit there for a while but she didn’t pick it up. I tried again. ‘Is that why your mum left? Because he worked all the time.’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘She just didn’t like the idea of being at home any more. Can’t say I blame her.’

  It was the second time she had refused the jump. Whatever or, more to the point, whoever had made her go, Mattie didn’t want to talk about it. Between the lines it was all pretty classic stuff: an only child who’d got all the attention for so long that when the parents started to think about themselves, they discovered they didn’t really like each other any more. So Dad compensates through work, and Mum … well, maybe she started to talk to the milkman.

  ‘But he does work too hard?’

  ‘Why not? There’s no one at home to make him stop, is there?’

  ‘Maybe they’ll get together again,’ I said, only because I thought she might want to hear it. ‘And you could come home.’

  ‘You must be joking. They don’t give a toss about each other, any more than they give a toss about me.’she slammed her finger on to the stereo button. ‘This music sucks. I’m going to put something else on.’

  Watching her face in profile, I had a clear memory of that kind of anger, the one that overtook you from behind and burnt up everything in its path. Mine had been about … well, what had it been about? Having parents that loved me too much and wouldn’t let me out into adu
lthood as fast as I was determined to go. At least there was a real reason for her anger. All dressed up for life and nowhere to go, except the school playground or the no man’s land of a marital war zone. God, if there’s one thing worse than growing older, it would be a slow return to adolescence.

  The blue motorway sign told me London was less than an hour away. I thought of other things we could talk about. But she beat me to it.

  ‘How old are you?’

  I wondered how to put it. ‘Over thirty.’ I shot her a glance. You could see she was shocked. ‘But it’s all right. I work out mentally.’

  If she found it funny, she didn’t let me know. ‘You’re not married?’

  ‘No. No, I’m not married.’

  ‘So how many men have you slept with?’

  Served me right, really. I mean you can’t make the conversation personal and then cry foul. I pretended to give it some consideration. As it happens, I already knew the answer. Men in my bed: just another of those lists one resorts to late at night when counting sheep doesn’t work. That and the names of the girls in my last year at school. A bit harder that one, but then we’re talking larger numbers.

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘Eighteen.’ despite herself she was impressed. You could hear it in the voice.

  ‘Yeah, but a lot of those were SLBA.’

  ‘SLBA?’

  ‘Sexual Liberation Before AIDS. I’m much choosier now.’ Or they are, I thought, but decided not to say. She was silent for a while. My God, I thought, I really have shocked her this time. Then she said, ‘My friend Helen’s having an affair.’

  ‘Is he better than Jason Donovan?’

  She snorted her disgust. Then said, rather eagerly, ‘He’s the school gardener.’

  ‘Very Lady Chatterley.’ I had a thought. ‘You know Lady Chatterley?’

  ‘Of course,’she sighed. ‘I read it when I was ten.’

  ‘Fine. So, do they meet in the potting shed?’

  ‘He’s got a room. In town. She goes there on Saturdays.’