Christmas is for kids, and for some time now this had been a bad time for Mace. Don't get me wrong, he’d say, he liked kids. He liked the little hands, the little feet, the wobbling heads, the gurgling gibberish, parent-smart bullying from the thrones of supermarket trolleys (‘Now. Now. Feeties, now!’). ‘Cute’ he’d murmur, not completely reluctantly, as Jo’s straight-backed, English nanny tone directed him (‘Look, Mason, look’), her grip tightening meaningfully on his arm as they watched yet another small, sloppy mouth widening and widening like a baby python’s over a complacent Teddy's mitten-hand or an earnest face, gripped for a moment in a pop-eyed struggle with wind before breaking into startled joy; with a now slightly over-familiar squeeze of his waist, she brought him to a halt before bandy-legged, stuttering runs, hysterical romps with durable puppies and terrified cats, short stubby arms stretched out for more, more, more. ‘Cute’ he’d tell her and often mean it, although increasingly hearing a self-conscious, pacifying tone working its way into his voice.
To be honest, his heart just wasn’t in it. He loved Jo, at least he assumed he did; love was after all a feeling, it was the most you could feel (wasn’t it?) but it was just a feeling and after ‘a year and two months’ (as she reminded him) there were other feelings beginning to offer a little competition.
Yes, kids looked fine, he told himself, fine. There they were, everywhere, all looking fine; from a distance. Kids are always good for a laugh, he’d say; and they love your laughter, they can't get enough of it, they can't stop laughing at it from their high chairs and low stools. Their blameless seduction was a survival instinct kicking in at birth: that first smile had you sliding into decisions without a moment’s hesitation, decisions guaranteed to change your life; forever. Kids are like that, they sell themselves; but they drive a hard bargain. They take away your life and give you a job and your job is not to fuck it up for them. You've got to keep the laughter rolling. The problem with kids, thought Mace (a thought he kept strictly to himself); the problem with kids is they make you think about yourself, and you start thinking in time, in years. And he’d begun to realise he couldn't think like that.
Mace really couldn’t think like that. To be honest, he was still a student in this thinking business, a truanting student. He was Mace; the single syllable tag itself, a legacy condensing the glory days of college, where controlled aggression (sometimes, let’s be totally honest here, not always quite so controlled) and a violence as sudden and uncompromising as the tag itself had offered him an image of himself which had seemed indelible (what his British ‘future father-in-law’ - Jesus - called, in his piss-assed British way, ‘Brighton Rock’, smiling at some secret humour from which Mace always felt excluded); an image which he’d seen systematically eroded along the short journey through his Twenties via a series of obscurely signposted compromises with life beyond the college gridiron; a legacy of what was becoming another life, a past life, a life which part of him, the biggest part, couldn’t believe he’d left behind.
He was, in fact, getting through a little more of this truanting, feeling sleepily settled, when he was blindsided by a tackle which left him a winded asthmatic. Pleasantly stretched out in the low-lit bedroom (in a flat his present salary alone could never secure), Paddy, Jo’s cat, curled up complacently on the pillow beside him, his mind replaying the afternoon classes with attentive middle-aged, mid-range gym bunnies, he’d just stalled into slo-mo the serious military crunches of that surprisingly agile blonde with the expensive hair and the easy laugh, replaying that discreet smile when Jo herself emerged from the bathroom like a magician’s assistant, hands clasped behind her back, feet pressed together, a hesitant, nervous smile pulling at her tightened lips, as if she’d just opened her mouth to sing (which she never did) and heard the opening notes spilling out in the wrong key.
In the days and long nights following her revelation, Mace slept like a baby; a baby who woke every two hours panting with a sense of profound foreboding. In his recurring dream he watched her lips telling him ‘Mason…You’re going to be a father.’ She hadn’t actually said these exact words, although she may have used the formal ‘Mason’ (which he heard like a mother’s reprimand), he just saw them in her face and, in the waking dark, replayed them so they felt relived, like a genuine memory; in future, he knew, it would be hard to tell the difference. Looking back, that wordless change in her face as she’d seen the look on his, carried the sense of a whole relationship passing through its final stages in seconds
But he was fine. She was fine. They’d had the talk. Mace’s talk; a coach’s half-time talk. She could do whatever she wanted, he’d told her at the end: ‘You do whatever you want. And whatever you decide…’ he’d said, leaving the sentence dangling while feeling nothing but the steel coil in his guts tightening in the long silence before she’d stopped twisting that thing in her hands and looked up with her nodding ‘It’s fine. I’ll be fine.’ ‘You will’ he’d confirmed, nodding with her and trying to hold down the tension in his voice, ‘You’ll be fine.’
And she was. ‘Fine. I’m fine.’ She’d repeated as three months later they negotiated the maze of duplicating hospital corridors, slowed by the dragging, scraping wheels of her suitcase, her limp arm clinging to his waist, like a jet-lagged refugee in Arrivals. It was disturbing, though surprisingly inevitable, to sense overwhelming relief down there within the mix of emotions greeting him when finally they found the sliding exit doors and shuddered into the sharp air of a December night.
This particular emotion, however, had found no correspondence in Jo, despite his serial ‘Don’t worry’s’, ‘never mind’s and ‘there’s ‘plenty of time’s’, the half-second of pursed lips simulating the nodding smile she knew he wanted to see did nothing to shift the weight she now carried from day to day. ‘Jeez, we’re no more than kids ourselves’ was a line he declined instinctively, though if he was thinking, if he wasn’t trying to kid himself, it was the solitary driver for his motivation. ‘We can always try again’, was the one comforting cliche he couldn’t bring himself to deliver.
The words, spoken and unspoken, were of course, just words, failing either to comfort her or suppress the new, alien awareness developing like an embryo within himself; as though he had deleted something he would only at some future moment recognise as precious.
However, after a long, listless week of mourning, wrapped in a tight chrysalis of bedsheets, one bright day she awoke suddenly before him into the form of a newly recharged woman; a woman he barely recognised. Like a rebirth, he thought, without a trace of irony but warily avoiding saying the word aloud, as day by day he found himself often having to second guess what lay beneath this brisk, bright, detached persona he usually associated with converted Christians; guesswork compounded by a seemingly genuine distance which had somehow grown between them.
A distance which even now made him shift uneasily beside her tense body in the stalled MG; well, shift as far as the Mace body might in the small car’s cramping claustrophobia; the ‘classic’ MG, Daddy’s present and her ‘baby’, acting up like a temperamental toddler having been deserted for an hour at the far end of the darkening car park. She twisted the ignition again, then again then looked up, expressionless, at the woman who'd crammed and compacted each of her green designer holdalls with such painfully slow deliberation ahead of them at the check-out, she might have really been packing bags for life, rather than Christmas; now planted by outrageous coincidence on the edge of their headlights, she was feeding toddlers and tots, Teds and trikes just as slowly into her Range Rover. Mace could only guess at the narrow spectrum of emotions settling itself within Jo’s head, her eyes glittering stones. her mouth hardening over a determined silence. He wanted to take over the driving but he already knew her response.
Instinctively, he placed a calming hand on her knee before remembering he no longer had a calming hand. She ignored the loose grip just resting there until he took it away, holding herself quite still, her eyes fixed unblinking at the logo of the steering wheel. A door slammed, kids swarmed restlessly over the back seats. The Range Rover, however, remained where it was, its driver presumably double checking an inventory of passengers and purchases. With an angry snort, Jo gave the key another vicious twist As if it had been waiting for just such a reaction, that little spark of violence, the engine responded with some aggression of its own, shrugging off its passive sulk and climbing up the escalator of juvenile defiance. It shot back from the bay, slickly failing to strip the shine off the BMW parked over-intimately beside them; arced with a shudder of gears before accelerating toward the exit, slaloming between the silver ghost of a juddering trolley and two sets of dawdling headlights scanning the aisles for the same elusive space, before screeching to a standstill at the barrier, teasingly out of arms reach of the booth. Jo wrenched open the icy door but still had to free herself from the dysfunctional seatbelt before she could hand over her ticket.
Slamming the door, she hiccupped over the hard speed hump at the exit, wrestled the wheel into a combative right, two hard, honking lefts (‘Yeah, Yeah,Yeah, fuck you too’) then another right in third, muscling past the startled shrieks of rapidly blinking headlights, until deceptively slowing to cruise speed, the cowering speedometer needle shivering just below insanity, as they channelled through pulsing jewels of misty neon at no more than a score above the legal limit .
‘Jo…?’ said Mace, meaningfully, but occupied in fielding the debris slipping over his shoulder from the carelessly overfilled bags packed in behind him, a can of Whiskas in his right hand, he could hear the single all-purpose syllable of command, realising it no longer carried the weight of authority, turning itself subserviently into a question.
‘What?’ Relishing the release afforded by her ascending reply, she repeated it with mock innocence, while driving her foot down even harder. ‘What? What?’ Headlights heading towards them blurred into exploding stars, shooting stars, meteorites.
‘Jo’ the stub of her name now a warning, all subtlety lost under the turbo roar taking them god knows where.
‘What?’ (or ‘Wha-tah’) the stressed ’t', a warning, in turn, to back off.
Another J was on the tip of his tongue now, as in ‘Jesus, what the fuck…’, but it was a tongue he was keen to bite as he watched the white lines shooting beneath them like the addled dreamscape of a coke insomniac. He didn't want to start something now, not here, not now.
‘What’s with the engine?’ had almost slipped out, just as an observation, just to keep things light and smooth. Its delinquent growl seemed high pitched, grating. But the needle still shivering at fifty in these narrow urban streets told him he'd better keep his observations to himself. We've got the thing started, he thought, let's just get back. Let's just get off the road before it really opens up.
And it was cold. She’d had the heater fixed three days before and three hours after the garage had closed for the weekend it had failed again. ‘You fix it’ she’d told him as he’d idly inspected the braille of the dashboard, working the tiny lever, trying to dial in some response. ‘It’s an old car’ he shrugged by way of consoling diagnosis. She’d just looked at him. This was her car, her baby; which was why his hands now remained firmly in his pockets, his collar up and his smart mouth closed.
‘Bitch’ she shout-whispered into the dark interior, her eyes fixed on whatever she could see of the road ahead, the lights slipping from amber to red as the MG swooped through the thankfully empty crossing. ‘And that lame-brain on the checkout: ‘Let them through, love’ Oh, thought Mace, that bitch. ‘Let them through. Let them through? Can you believe it?’ The question required no response; any simulation of interaction was foolish illusion, all the questions were rhetorical in this monologue. ’I mean, what? What is this? Let them through…What are they, a fucking passport?Fucking zombie. Did you see her? I mean, did you see her? Can’t control her own fucking kids and somehow she’s a fucking martyr. Deal with them, bitch! Don’t have them if you can’t deal with them.’
Mace knew what she wanted with this bitch business. She wanted it to start all over again, but she didn’t want to start it. He dug his hands deeper into his pockets while she tap-tapped her nails on the wheel as the thickening traffic forced her speed down. She's going to say something, he thought, she's going to start in again now. He turned on the radio. Some Soul diva ooh-oohing through a climax. In one slick motion, Jo twisted the volume to almost nothing.
‘We’ve forgotten something.’ she stated, coldly, firmly, her voice suspiciously calm. They spent a long pause listening to the engine, muttering to itself now at a straggling jog. ’We’ve forgotten something. What is it?’
He answered her as though it was a real question. How would he know? How much food do you need for three days? They'd never spent Christmas alone and the car was packed with enough ham and turkey, Whiskas and Brekkies for a siege - just in case. Just in case of what, there was some festive run on cat food? If there was, Paddy was going to be all right. Paddy wasn't going to suffer. They were there to see to that. They were there to look after him. 'No one else would', that's why they were there. Someone probably would, some neighbour, some cattery, but Jo wouldn't let them. She was taking no risks with Paddy. Nothing was going to happen to Paddy. They would not be seeing ‘Mum and Dad’, nor Katie (Jo’s younger, fertile sister), nor the new baby, for whom Katie seemed to think ‘Christmas had been created’.
‘I'm glad we're staying home. It's a relief….Champagne in bed.’ she said over-brightly, wrenching the gear stick. ‘I'll call Mum as soon as we get in.’
He was looking at her legs, the black coat open, the tight skirt riding high up her thigh. His hand, pausing with its too brief request on her knee, began sliding questioningly into the warm, widening, gear-shifting V. Looking straight ahead, her face didn't alter.
‘Julie looked well, didn't she? What good legs those dancers have. No breasts, but good legs.’
The hand froze, reluctantly returning to the meagre warmth of his pocket, feeling out the phone which, safely on silent, suddenly began trembling again like a vibrator between his fingers. His grip tightened until he seemed to squeeze it into submission. Some Christmas.
The traffic was now reduced to walking pace and for some distance they trailed another Range Rover or maybe the same one they’d left in Waitrose. A diminutive, blonde girl was lazily wiping a port-hole in the steamed back window, pressing her lips against the glass then wiping it again, her hands moving like a bored mime. Catching sight of them suddenly broke her trance and she began waving or maybe just rubbed harder, it was hard to tell. Mace didn't need to look at Jo's face.
The traffic ground to a standstill and slowly the dreamy smile faded from the child’s face. Her hand was still waving, wearily wiping at the ever sealing hole in the back window while her mind had drifted elsewhere; Christmas perhaps. Jo pulled the MG left and down a puzzle of narrow streets.
More kids. Hovering in the half-light They were everywhere. Someone was planting them on every corner, on skates and skateboards, on bikes and trikes. Jo was racing them down these cramped streets cramped further by lines of kerb-hugging cars. Mace couldn’t tell where they were heading, Some remembered rat-run? He just hoped Jo had some idea. Let it go, he thought, let her run it off. What can happen? She can only kill us.
He could see it all before it happened, in the lagged time-warp of every accident: the girl on her BMX, accelerating down the slope of her parallel pavement track, fat tyres bumping and bobbing as she pumped harder and faster, Halloween luminous in the dimmed streetlight, knees and elbow guards flashing, backside rising from the saddle with urgent effort as she began tip-toeing in a sort of bad-dream underwater strangeness. Suddenly lost behind a bumper to bumper chain of darkened cars, she shot out again incredibly into the road ahead.
It didn't feel like an accident. It felt as though they'd skidded past the danger. The suspension had suffered a little hiccup on the right hand side where some aborted squeal had been flung out somewhere behind. They'd been lucky, the girl veering at speed across the edge of the emergency stop, had been lucky, it had just been a warning. The girl had disappeared, the car was at a standstill. Jo would drive on now, more slowly; chastened at last.
They waited, listening to their own panicked breathing, silently assessing the psychic damage. Jo knew what it was. Jo knew exactly what it was. Mace didn't want to know. He wanted to be home, home and free, out of this. He lay back where the belt had wrenched him into place, hands still in his pockets, fruit and veg and god knows what else in his lap. He was not going to move. But she just sat there, upright, straight-backed staring at the wheel until he got out of the car.
The street was strangely silent, the air sharp and sobering but he didn't have to walk far back up the frosted tarmac. At the fading end of snaking skid marks, a small, dark bundle lay starkly exposed beneath the weak, silver glow of the streetlight. He wasn’t used to seeing dead things, but this thing was very dead, even he could see that. Crushed sideways as if caught stretching into deeper sleep, he could feel the whole weight of the thing against his foot as he tried to ease it out of sight under the side of a parked car.
‘What are you doing?’
She was watching him in the wing mirror as she reversed, his door still open. It's nothing, he wanted to tell her, just a hunk of ripped tyre, happens all the time round here, people use the place like a racetrack. But she knew very well what it was.
‘It's a cat’, was what he told her. She said nothing.
This was silent interrogation and he hadn't given her what she wanted, anything like what she wanted. He knew he had to go through the business of a full inspection: the bared teeth, the plumped belly. Yes, it was a tabby, just like Paddy. Exactly like Paddy, a little smaller maybe, a little younger. Yes, maybe like Paddy’s little brother. Yes, it had a collar: a medallion, flashing and blurring under its chin as it resisted his fingering. Of course, it had everything: name (Rocky - what was this, some sort of Macho Latino of the feline world?) address, even a telephone number for any cool bitch who got lucky (she was out beside him now with her phone torch, squatting over the body on the icy tarmac). This was a cat with a home all right. But it was a dead cat now. It looked like a very dead cat, with a very sick look on its face. This is it, he thought, we've killed Rocky on his own manor.
‘We've got to give it back’ she said, as though she'd actually been considering taking it home (Mace loved the 'We').
‘What? Are you serious?’ he said, watching her gently, lovingly scoop the thing up, its heavy head drooping over her elbow. Oh fuck, he thought. Where’s that mad cyclist? It was her fault, her problem. She should be here to deal with it. She should be taking some responsibility.
Jo, however, had already left him and the car in the middle of the deserted street. He felt the hard, cold edge of the open door but instead of climbing in and driving away (out of there, right now, before it was too late). He slammed it shut, put the keys in his pocket and looked around helplessly for Jo, already backing her way in through the gate of one of the terraced houses..
The curtained bay window, like several in the street, glowed with a warm internal stillness of festive greens and reds but in the silence of the pause after Jo, struggling with the dead body, finally reached the bell with its two note descending chime, it seemed (or Mace hoped) no one was home. However, just as Jo took a step back a curtain lifted in the window and a face appeared, a small face, a child's face framed by its border of artificial snow as roughly sprayed as a pre-school project.
A woman with a very big face opened the door. Mace thought woman rather than girl although she looked not much older than Jo. When she saw the bundle limply draped across Jo’s level arms like a religious offering, her mouth made the same O shape as her eyes. She covered it quickly with a big soprano hand while her big soprano body made an excellent job of blocking the doorway; her hips just failing to prevent a little girl's head determinedly squeezing through. Je-sus, thought Mace, there are just too many kids in this world.
Inside it was suddenly Christmas. A face-tingling aura of warm air sucked them into a daze of domestic bliss; a low-lit grotto hung with twists of tinsel and chains of luminous miniature lanterns wreathing the walls, mirrors, and, by the window, the stilled chaos of the tree. The place was a furniture showroom offering the exact simulation of a festive family home (poor but honest, simple but proud). Womb-like, thought Mace; of course, why wouldn’t it be? Yes, this was most definitely a loving home for little Rocky; with an obligatory loving family, more of whom were appearing with every embarrassed twist and turn, the walls closing in with each startled cry from each new arrival, repeating his name as if they couldn't quite believe it either: ‘Rocky?’, ‘Rocky?’ It was a debate in a Stallone convention where no one remembered the dynamic narrative structure of First Blood. Come on, Mace thought, what did you expect? If you'd given him some other name he might still be alive and curled up on the sofa. Where cats were supposed to be. What was he doing out there, his little muscles braced against a speeding hunk of angry sports car, if not trying to live up to his macho image? Big Dad, raising his soft weight from his favourite armchair, was no obvious boxing fan, but someone here was responsible for that handle.
When the smallest child appeared from the hall, peeling herself slowly from the diminutive silhouette in the doorway, the ragged chorus came to an abrupt halt.
Of course the child was hand-picked too. Waist high and dry-eyed, elbowing gently free of Big Mum’s helplessly protective arms, she stood centre stage, directly in front of Jo as if in awe, her mouth opening in quizzical slow-motion while the audience held its breath for the soundtrack to kick in. Mace recognised her as the face in the window. About eight or nine, a bob of red hair and the tough little tomboy look of an embryonic Feminist. Dressed in the standard outfit of an off-duty gymnast, she looked tough, but not too tough for luminous knee and elbow guards. He looked a long time at these, while her wide eyes, angled upward, flipped from Rocky to Jo and back again, calibrating this strange unimagined image or perhaps sighting her aim for the stillborn scream.
When she reached out to touch, or almost touch the head sagging more loosely than a soft toy over Jo’s left elbow, she suddenly looked very young - like a child, a brave child who had cuddled and nuzzled little Rocky as a kitten while his heart pumped delirium under her hand. Now she stared at him as though he was some unwanted present thrust upon her far too early. She was not ready for this. This was not what she’d had in mind, not right now, not ever. But it was a present she could not give back. Her elastic face contorted itself through a child’s gurning repertoire of pure pain until it came up with what looked like the right expression: betrayal.
It was some amateur magician’s sick trick, surely. It couldn’t be Rocky, could it? Not dead like that. What had happened to those nine lives? Where was that Tom and Jerry resilience? Reaching out across the barrier of Big Mum’s clasped arms, she grazed the fur of his now sagging paunch with the knuckles of her loose fist. She might have been pushing him away.
Big Mum drew her daughter back into her big arms, snuggling the bobbing head beneath the big breasts and searching for reassurance in Big Dad’s eyes, who, rooted on restless feet and trying to avoid hiding his own empty hands in his pockets, was a virtual doppelgänger in size and startled confusion; both had been rattled and were only slowly reclaiming balance and composure. What was the polite form in this scenario? With guests who deliver death to your doorstep? This couple (allies in a shared diet or some matchmaking gravitational pull) had come together to make this home and this child in it and this was their time; a time in which unwanted visitors, uninvited, unannounced, had exploded in on them like a nail bomb. Yet even in disaster there is humanity, the orphaned baby pulled from the rubble of the earthquake. They had sunk everything, their honest working lives, into this child and now she was giving them something in return by just standing there, quiet and brave. She was giving them everything. She looked like a sound investment.
Jo couldn’t take her eyes from the child who went on staring wide-eyed at Rocky as though still expecting him to squirm and elbow his way out of the arms of this whispering, hysterical woman.
Everyone else, however, was looking at Jo. And so was Mace. ‘I'm sorry…’ she was saying, her face working overtime to control a competing series of Tourette tics. "I'm sorry…’ she repeated, gripping mangled Rocky tighter and tighter as though afraid to give him up, as though she would take him away, have him repaired somehow and give him back later, fresh and new, bright and kittenish.
‘Don’t worry, love’ said someone, Big Mum in fact, with a certain empathy it seemed; but though her mouth struggled to form a sympathetic smile, Jo’s eyes drifted past her on a random journey around the room. The place was just too neat and the cat too much of a mess.
Finally, Big Dad, fully balanced at last, suddenly all bustle and business, failing to relieve her of the dead thing, led her out into the kitchen. From the end of the hall Mace watched him tenderly fan out a wide sheet of paper over the floor; Christmas wrapping paper, tube-fresh and curling up rebelliously as if it knew what was coming. Big Dad helped her spread Rocky across it like an awkwardly shaped present he’d struggle to wrap later, before hoisting himself upright with a sigh, slyly appreciating her legs (thought Mace) as her heels tapped out a hesitant pirouette on the tiled floor.
Back in the front room, Big Mum, still had the child trapped in the narrow space between mini bar and soundless TV (a forgotten cartoon splashing violent colour across the screen), their faces locked together side by side in a before-and-after while she muttered a soothing mantra or lullaby into the small, pink ear.
Breaking off from her crooning, she offered Mace a drink, as if this was how you attended to killers who brought your cat home dead. So they stood holding drinks and waiting for some conversation to happen. Rocky was two years old, she told him, he nodded and they were suddenly stuck with the story of the killing. There was only one subject between them. She didn't want to hear it and he didn't want to tell it, but there he was, trying to plead his innocence as though the family might be considering legal action. ‘Jo was driving’ he heard myself say at one point, looking back at the open door, where the kid must have slipped away; upstairs to release her sobs? Out into the street searching for the real Rocky?
As if she’d been listening from the hall, Jo now appeared, trailing Big Dad who was mumbling something ragged and consoling Mace didn't catch, some ‘Darn worry love, everyfink'll be awright.’ And, to the relief of Mace, stalling Big Mum’s casual interrogation: where did they live? How far? (What was she going to do, call the Police? Bin Paddy? Even the score?). Mace, however, was looking at the wide, dark stain across Jo's top, the damp cloth in Big Dad's hand, when a frustrated car horn caught everyone’s attention.
The whole operation moved itself out into the dark, cold road with a hurried walking chatter involving conflicting directions and instructions, aiding the killers to find their way home, or at least back the to the main road, Big Dad simultaneously keeping road rage to a simmer by redirecting angry headlights back up the narrow rat run to an unlit, almost invisible side road. Who, they wanted to know, would be taking the wheel? Immediately, Jo stopped to frisk herself with renewed hysteria. Seeing Mace produce the keys, she snatched them with a tight-lipped smile, simulating a sudden fit of suspicious composure to close down any further debate. Her face was stiff but she moved it mechanically from side to side, explaining how she ‘needed’ to drive, she ‘had’ to drive. She'd be all right. ‘Alright’ she said, echoing the returning Big Daddy’s ‘Awright, love?’, ‘Yes, yes, I’m alright now. I’m fine.’
Amazingly, the engine fired up first time, roaring like a 747. She eased back on the gas, paused as if to install night vision, then engaged gear. Rocky’s family, upright, watchful meerkats, faded into the dark of the side mirror as she cleared the road. At the first corner, however, she bumped the pavement and stalled. "You are alright?" asked Mace, distorting her mantra. She didn't even look at him. She raised her eyebrows and widened her lips until she was now almost smiling at last, amazed at herself, her head moving again, robotically from side to side. Maze had no idea whether this was yes or no.
She drove on steadily, easing through the maze of streets at walking pace with contemplative deliberation, learning how to drive all over again or perhaps considering, at every corner, turning back to Rocky’s house for a more detailed absolution. Slowly, however, the speed crept up until the hastily repacked bags were nudging his shoulder once more, pressing him to take control, do something.
As they swung out into the blaring horns and flashing lights of some arterial road, his skewed internal GPS had a vague idea where they were at last and they were not heading home. Jo, however, who now seemed to have lost her learner’s caution as well as any interest in the polite courtesy of the highway, looked as though she knew exactly where they were heading. She was going somewhere and she had to be there now, yesterday, last year. Mace now noticed how close they were to the centre of the road. It was hard not to notice this because she’d begun veering into the opposite lane and back again, her hands at ten to two lifting inches above the steering wheel, confirming a right-sided drift, and the shoddy workmanship in the garage. Shouting had no obvious effect, she had her foot down and just went on swinging in and out of any oncoming headlights. ‘You can't fucking kill us’ he heard himself say, but that was exactly what she could do, while he just sat there swearing in awe at the succession of blaring flares until in a rush he forced her off the wheel and got his foot in there on the brake and they spun in a manic gyro-skid before coming to a halt, the world outside contorted at a bewildering angle. They’d hit something bigger than Rocky this time.
Jo, however, hadn’t come to any halt; thwarted in climax, she was already pounding what she could reach of him in an awkward two-fisted frustration. Mace let her go on, offering no resistance, he was beyond all that, just kept his shoulder pressed to her, crushing her right up to the door until she couldn’t move. She was still for a while then, holding on to something unfinished, the way Paddy freezes after the first struggle has told you he doesn't want to be held, leaving you hugging a coiled spring of stalled violence.
Locked together, they remained a long time there in the dark (the interior lit by the occasional passing headlights), while he assessed the damage. Unable to see her face, it was a while before he became aware of the muffled sobs. When at last he released his hold, she remained still for a moment then bowed her head and really let go: loud, reckless sobbing, like a child. He put his arms around her again to draw her in, his thick blunt fingers kneading the muscles in her neck. It didn’t take such a great effort. What else could he do? They were stuck there and they couldn't drive away.
Rocky IX
Christmas is for kids, and for some time now this had been a bad time for Mace. Don't get me wrong, he’d say, he liked kids. He liked the little hands, the little feet, the wobbling heads, the gurgling gibberish, parent-smart bullying from the thrones of supermarket trolleys (‘Now. Now. Feeties, now!’). ‘Cute’ he’d murmur, not completely reluctantly, as Jo’s straight-backed, English nanny tone directed him (‘Look, Mason, look’), her grip tightening meaningfully on his arm as they watched yet another small, sloppy mouth widening and widening like a baby python’s over a complacent Teddy's mitten-hand or an earnest face, gripped for a moment in a pop-eyed struggle with wind before breaking into startled joy; with a now slightly over-familiar squeeze of his waist, she brought him to a halt before bandy-legged, stuttering runs, hysterical romps with durable puppies and terrified cats, short stubby arms stretched out for more, more, more. ‘Cute’ he’d tell her and often mean it, although increasingly hearing a self-conscious, pacifying tone working its way into his voice.
To be honest, his heart just wasn’t in it. He loved Jo, at least he assumed he did; love was after all a feeling, it was the most you could feel (wasn’t it?) but it was just a feeling and after ‘a year and two months’ (as she reminded him) there were other feelings beginning to offer a little competition.
Yes, kids looked fine, he told himself, fine. There they were, everywhere, all looking fine; from a distance. Kids are always good for a laugh, he’d say; and they love your laughter, they can't get enough of it, they can't stop laughing at it from their high chairs and low stools. Their blameless seduction was a survival instinct kicking in at birth: that first smile had you sliding into decisions without a moment’s hesitation, decisions guaranteed to change your life; forever. Kids are like that, they sell themselves; but they drive a hard bargain. They take away your life and give you a job and your job is not to fuck it up for them. You've got to keep the laughter rolling. The problem with kids, thought Mace (a thought he kept strictly to himself); the problem with kids is they make you think about yourself, and you start thinking in time, in years. And he’d begun to realise he couldn't think like that.
Mace really couldn’t think like that. To be honest, he was still a student in this thinking business, a truanting student. He was Mace; the single syllable tag itself, a legacy condensing the glory days of college, where controlled aggression (sometimes, let’s be totally honest here, not always quite so controlled) and a violence as sudden and uncompromising as the tag itself had offered him an image of himself which had seemed indelible (what his British ‘future father-in-law’ - Jesus - called, in his piss-assed British way, ‘Brighton Rock’, smiling at some secret humour from which Mace always felt excluded); an image which he’d seen systematically eroded along the short journey through his Twenties via a series of obscurely signposted compromises with life beyond the college gridiron; a legacy of what was becoming another life, a past life, a life which part of him, the biggest part, couldn’t believe he’d left behind.
He was, in fact, getting through a little more of this truanting, feeling sleepily settled, when he was blindsided by a tackle which left him a winded asthmatic. Pleasantly stretched out in the low-lit bedroom (in a flat his present salary alone could never secure), Paddy, Jo’s cat, curled up complacently on the pillow beside him, his mind replaying the afternoon classes with attentive middle-aged, mid-range gym bunnies, he’d just stalled into slo-mo the serious military crunches of that surprisingly agile blonde with the expensive hair and the easy laugh, replaying that discreet smile when Jo herself emerged from the bathroom like a magician’s assistant, hands clasped behind her back, feet pressed together, a hesitant, nervous smile pulling at her tightened lips, as if she’d just opened her mouth to sing (which she never did) and heard the opening notes spilling out in the wrong key.
In the days and long nights following her revelation, Mace slept like a baby; a baby who woke every two hours panting with a sense of profound foreboding. In his recurring dream he watched her lips telling him ‘Mason…You’re going to be a father.’ She hadn’t actually said these exact words, although she may have used the formal ‘Mason’ (which he heard like a mother’s reprimand), he just saw them in her face and, in the waking dark, replayed them so they felt relived, like a genuine memory; in future, he knew, it would be hard to tell the difference. Looking back, that wordless change in her face as she’d seen the look on his, carried the sense of a whole relationship passing through its final stages in seconds
But he was fine. She was fine. They’d had the talk. Mace’s talk; a coach’s half-time talk. She could do whatever she wanted, he’d told her at the end: ‘You do whatever you want. And whatever you decide…’ he’d said, leaving the sentence dangling while feeling nothing but the steel coil in his guts tightening in the long silence before she’d stopped twisting that thing in her hands and looked up with her nodding ‘It’s fine. I’ll be fine.’ ‘You will’ he’d confirmed, nodding with her and trying to hold down the tension in his voice, ‘You’ll be fine.’
And she was. ‘Fine. I’m fine.’ She’d repeated as three months later they negotiated the maze of duplicating hospital corridors, slowed by the dragging, scraping wheels of her suitcase, her limp arm clinging to his waist, like a jet-lagged refugee in Arrivals. It was disturbing, though surprisingly inevitable, to sense overwhelming relief down there within the mix of emotions greeting him when finally they found the sliding exit doors and shuddered into the sharp air of a December night.
This particular emotion, however, had found no correspondence in Jo, despite his serial ‘Don’t worry’s’, ‘never mind’s and ‘there’s ‘plenty of time’s’, the half-second of pursed lips simulating the nodding smile she knew he wanted to see did nothing to shift the weight she now carried from day to day. ‘Jeez, we’re no more than kids ourselves’ was a line he declined instinctively, though if he was thinking, if he wasn’t trying to kid himself, it was the solitary driver for his motivation. ‘We can always try again’, was the one comforting cliche he couldn’t bring himself to deliver.
The words, spoken and unspoken, were of course, just words, failing either to comfort her or suppress the new, alien awareness developing like an embryo within himself; as though he had deleted something he would only at some future moment recognise as precious.
However, after a long, listless week of mourning, wrapped in a tight chrysalis of bedsheets, one bright day she awoke suddenly before him into the form of a newly recharged woman; a woman he barely recognised. Like a rebirth, he thought, without a trace of irony but warily avoiding saying the word aloud, as day by day he found himself often having to second guess what lay beneath this brisk, bright, detached persona he usually associated with converted Christians; guesswork compounded by a seemingly genuine distance which had somehow grown between them.
A distance which even now made him shift uneasily beside her tense body in the stalled MG; well, shift as far as the Mace body might in the small car’s cramping claustrophobia; the ‘classic’ MG, Daddy’s present and her ‘baby’, acting up like a temperamental toddler having been deserted for an hour at the far end of the darkening car park. She twisted the ignition again, then again then looked up, expressionless, at the woman who'd crammed and compacted each of her green designer holdalls with such painfully slow deliberation ahead of them at the check-out, she might have really been packing bags for life, rather than Christmas; now planted by outrageous coincidence on the edge of their headlights, she was feeding toddlers and tots, Teds and trikes just as slowly into her Range Rover. Mace could only guess at the narrow spectrum of emotions settling itself within Jo’s head, her eyes glittering stones. her mouth hardening over a determined silence. He wanted to take over the driving but he already knew her response.
Instinctively, he placed a calming hand on her knee before remembering he no longer had a calming hand. She ignored the loose grip just resting there until he took it away, holding herself quite still, her eyes fixed unblinking at the logo of the steering wheel. A door slammed, kids swarmed restlessly over the back seats. The Range Rover, however, remained where it was, its driver presumably double checking an inventory of passengers and purchases. With an angry snort, Jo gave the key another vicious twist As if it had been waiting for just such a reaction, that little spark of violence, the engine responded with some aggression of its own, shrugging off its passive sulk and climbing up the escalator of juvenile defiance. It shot back from the bay, slickly failing to strip the shine off the BMW parked over-intimately beside them; arced with a shudder of gears before accelerating toward the exit, slaloming between the silver ghost of a juddering trolley and two sets of dawdling headlights scanning the aisles for the same elusive space, before screeching to a standstill at the barrier, teasingly out of arms reach of the booth. Jo wrenched open the icy door but still had to free herself from the dysfunctional seatbelt before she could hand over her ticket.
Slamming the door, she hiccupped over the hard speed hump at the exit, wrestled the wheel into a combative right, two hard, honking lefts (‘Yeah, Yeah,Yeah, fuck you too’) then another right in third, muscling past the startled shrieks of rapidly blinking headlights, until deceptively slowing to cruise speed, the cowering speedometer needle shivering just below insanity, as they channelled through pulsing jewels of misty neon at no more than a score above the legal limit .
‘Jo…?’ said Mace, meaningfully, but occupied in fielding the debris slipping over his shoulder from the carelessly overfilled bags packed in behind him, a can of Whiskas in his right hand, he could hear the single all-purpose syllable of command, realising it no longer carried the weight of authority, turning itself subserviently into a question.
‘What?’ Relishing the release afforded by her ascending reply, she repeated it with mock innocence, while driving her foot down even harder. ‘What? What?’ Headlights heading towards them blurred into exploding stars, shooting stars, meteorites.
‘Jo’ the stub of her name now a warning, all subtlety lost under the turbo roar taking them god knows where.
‘What?’ (or ‘Wha-tah’) the stressed ’t', a warning, in turn, to back off.
Another J was on the tip of his tongue now, as in ‘Jesus, what the fuck…’, but it was a tongue he was keen to bite as he watched the white lines shooting beneath them like the addled dreamscape of a coke insomniac. He didn't want to start something now, not here, not now.
‘What’s with the engine?’ had almost slipped out, just as an observation, just to keep things light and smooth. Its delinquent growl seemed high pitched, grating. But the needle still shivering at fifty in these narrow urban streets told him he'd better keep his observations to himself. We've got the thing started, he thought, let's just get back. Let's just get off the road before it really opens up.
And it was cold. She’d had the heater fixed three days before and three hours after the garage had closed for the weekend it had failed again. ‘You fix it’ she’d told him as he’d idly inspected the braille of the dashboard, working the tiny lever, trying to dial in some response. ‘It’s an old car’ he shrugged by way of consoling diagnosis. She’d just looked at him. This was her car, her baby; which was why his hands now remained firmly in his pockets, his collar up and his smart mouth closed.
‘Bitch’ she shout-whispered into the dark interior, her eyes fixed on whatever she could see of the road ahead, the lights slipping from amber to red as the MG swooped through the thankfully empty crossing. ‘And that lame-brain on the checkout: ‘Let them through, love’ Oh, thought Mace, that bitch. ‘Let them through. Let them through? Can you believe it?’ The question required no response; any simulation of interaction was foolish illusion, all the questions were rhetorical in this monologue. ’I mean, what? What is this? Let them through…What are they, a fucking passport?Fucking zombie. Did you see her? I mean, did you see her? Can’t control her own fucking kids and somehow she’s a fucking martyr. Deal with them, bitch! Don’t have them if you can’t deal with them.’
Mace knew what she wanted with this bitch business. She wanted it to start all over again, but she didn’t want to start it. He dug his hands deeper into his pockets while she tap-tapped her nails on the wheel as the thickening traffic forced her speed down. She's going to say something, he thought, she's going to start in again now. He turned on the radio. Some Soul diva ooh-oohing through a climax. In one slick motion, Jo twisted the volume to almost nothing.
‘We’ve forgotten something.’ she stated, coldly, firmly, her voice suspiciously calm. They spent a long pause listening to the engine, muttering to itself now at a straggling jog. ’We’ve forgotten something. What is it?’
He answered her as though it was a real question. How would he know? How much food do you need for three days? They'd never spent Christmas alone and the car was packed with enough ham and turkey, Whiskas and Brekkies for a siege - just in case. Just in case of what, there was some festive run on cat food? If there was, Paddy was going to be all right. Paddy wasn't going to suffer. They were there to see to that. They were there to look after him. 'No one else would', that's why they were there. Someone probably would, some neighbour, some cattery, but Jo wouldn't let them. She was taking no risks with Paddy. Nothing was going to happen to Paddy. They would not be seeing ‘Mum and Dad’, nor Katie (Jo’s younger, fertile sister), nor the new baby, for whom Katie seemed to think ‘Christmas had been created’.
‘I'm glad we're staying home. It's a relief….Champagne in bed.’ she said over-brightly, wrenching the gear stick. ‘I'll call Mum as soon as we get in.’
He was looking at her legs, the black coat open, the tight skirt riding high up her thigh. His hand, pausing with its too brief request on her knee, began sliding questioningly into the warm, widening, gear-shifting V. Looking straight ahead, her face didn't alter.
‘Julie looked well, didn't she? What good legs those dancers have. No breasts, but good legs.’
The hand froze, reluctantly returning to the meagre warmth of his pocket, feeling out the phone which, safely on silent, suddenly began trembling again like a vibrator between his fingers. His grip tightened until he seemed to squeeze it into submission. Some Christmas.
The traffic was now reduced to walking pace and for some distance they trailed another Range Rover or maybe the same one they’d left in Waitrose. A diminutive, blonde girl was lazily wiping a port-hole in the steamed back window, pressing her lips against the glass then wiping it again, her hands moving like a bored mime. Catching sight of them suddenly broke her trance and she began waving or maybe just rubbed harder, it was hard to tell. Mace didn't need to look at Jo's face.
The traffic ground to a standstill and slowly the dreamy smile faded from the child’s face. Her hand was still waving, wearily wiping at the ever sealing hole in the back window while her mind had drifted elsewhere; Christmas perhaps. Jo pulled the MG left and down a puzzle of narrow streets.
More kids. Hovering in the half-light They were everywhere. Someone was planting them on every corner, on skates and skateboards, on bikes and trikes. Jo was racing them down these cramped streets cramped further by lines of kerb-hugging cars. Mace couldn’t tell where they were heading, Some remembered rat-run? He just hoped Jo had some idea. Let it go, he thought, let her run it off. What can happen? She can only kill us.
He could see it all before it happened, in the lagged time-warp of every accident: the girl on her BMX, accelerating down the slope of her parallel pavement track, fat tyres bumping and bobbing as she pumped harder and faster, Halloween luminous in the dimmed streetlight, knees and elbow guards flashing, backside rising from the saddle with urgent effort as she began tip-toeing in a sort of bad-dream underwater strangeness. Suddenly lost behind a bumper to bumper chain of darkened cars, she shot out again incredibly into the road ahead.
It didn't feel like an accident. It felt as though they'd skidded past the danger. The suspension had suffered a little hiccup on the right hand side where some aborted squeal had been flung out somewhere behind. They'd been lucky, the girl veering at speed across the edge of the emergency stop, had been lucky, it had just been a warning. The girl had disappeared, the car was at a standstill. Jo would drive on now, more slowly; chastened at last.
They waited, listening to their own panicked breathing, silently assessing the psychic damage. Jo knew what it was. Jo knew exactly what it was. Mace didn't want to know. He wanted to be home, home and free, out of this. He lay back where the belt had wrenched him into place, hands still in his pockets, fruit and veg and god knows what else in his lap. He was not going to move. But she just sat there, upright, straight-backed staring at the wheel until he got out of the car.
The street was strangely silent, the air sharp and sobering but he didn't have to walk far back up the frosted tarmac. At the fading end of snaking skid marks, a small, dark bundle lay starkly exposed beneath the weak, silver glow of the streetlight. He wasn’t used to seeing dead things, but this thing was very dead, even he could see that. Crushed sideways as if caught stretching into deeper sleep, he could feel the whole weight of the thing against his foot as he tried to ease it out of sight under the side of a parked car.
‘What are you doing?’
She was watching him in the wing mirror as she reversed, his door still open. It's nothing, he wanted to tell her, just a hunk of ripped tyre, happens all the time round here, people use the place like a racetrack. But she knew very well what it was.
‘It's a cat’, was what he told her. She said nothing.
This was silent interrogation and he hadn't given her what she wanted, anything like what she wanted. He knew he had to go through the business of a full inspection: the bared teeth, the plumped belly. Yes, it was a tabby, just like Paddy. Exactly like Paddy, a little smaller maybe, a little younger. Yes, maybe like Paddy’s little brother. Yes, it had a collar: a medallion, flashing and blurring under its chin as it resisted his fingering. Of course, it had everything: name (Rocky - what was this, some sort of Macho Latino of the feline world?) address, even a telephone number for any cool bitch who got lucky (she was out beside him now with her phone torch, squatting over the body on the icy tarmac). This was a cat with a home all right. But it was a dead cat now. It looked like a very dead cat, with a very sick look on its face. This is it, he thought, we've killed Rocky on his own manor.
‘We've got to give it back’ she said, as though she'd actually been considering taking it home (Mace loved the 'We').
‘What? Are you serious?’ he said, watching her gently, lovingly scoop the thing up, its heavy head drooping over her elbow. Oh fuck, he thought. Where’s that mad cyclist? It was her fault, her problem. She should be here to deal with it. She should be taking some responsibility.
Jo, however, had already left him and the car in the middle of the deserted street. He felt the hard, cold edge of the open door but instead of climbing in and driving away (out of there, right now, before it was too late). He slammed it shut, put the keys in his pocket and looked around helplessly for Jo, already backing her way in through the gate of one of the terraced houses..
The curtained bay window, like several in the street, glowed with a warm internal stillness of festive greens and reds but in the silence of the pause after Jo, struggling with the dead body, finally reached the bell with its two note descending chime, it seemed (or Mace hoped) no one was home. However, just as Jo took a step back a curtain lifted in the window and a face appeared, a small face, a child's face framed by its border of artificial snow as roughly sprayed as a pre-school project.
A woman with a very big face opened the door. Mace thought woman rather than girl although she looked not much older than Jo. When she saw the bundle limply draped across Jo’s level arms like a religious offering, her mouth made the same O shape as her eyes. She covered it quickly with a big soprano hand while her big soprano body made an excellent job of blocking the doorway; her hips just failing to prevent a little girl's head determinedly squeezing through. Je-sus, thought Mace, there are just too many kids in this world.
Inside it was suddenly Christmas. A face-tingling aura of warm air sucked them into a daze of domestic bliss; a low-lit grotto hung with twists of tinsel and chains of luminous miniature lanterns wreathing the walls, mirrors, and, by the window, the stilled chaos of the tree. The place was a furniture showroom offering the exact simulation of a festive family home (poor but honest, simple but proud). Womb-like, thought Mace; of course, why wouldn’t it be? Yes, this was most definitely a loving home for little Rocky; with an obligatory loving family, more of whom were appearing with every embarrassed twist and turn, the walls closing in with each startled cry from each new arrival, repeating his name as if they couldn't quite believe it either: ‘Rocky?’, ‘Rocky?’ It was a debate in a Stallone convention where no one remembered the dynamic narrative structure of First Blood. Come on, Mace thought, what did you expect? If you'd given him some other name he might still be alive and curled up on the sofa. Where cats were supposed to be. What was he doing out there, his little muscles braced against a speeding hunk of angry sports car, if not trying to live up to his macho image? Big Dad, raising his soft weight from his favourite armchair, was no obvious boxing fan, but someone here was responsible for that handle.
When the smallest child appeared from the hall, peeling herself slowly from the diminutive silhouette in the doorway, the ragged chorus came to an abrupt halt.
Of course the child was hand-picked too. Waist high and dry-eyed, elbowing gently free of Big Mum’s helplessly protective arms, she stood centre stage, directly in front of Jo as if in awe, her mouth opening in quizzical slow-motion while the audience held its breath for the soundtrack to kick in. Mace recognised her as the face in the window. About eight or nine, a bob of red hair and the tough little tomboy look of an embryonic Feminist. Dressed in the standard outfit of an off-duty gymnast, she looked tough, but not too tough for luminous knee and elbow guards. He looked a long time at these, while her wide eyes, angled upward, flipped from Rocky to Jo and back again, calibrating this strange unimagined image or perhaps sighting her aim for the stillborn scream.
When she reached out to touch, or almost touch the head sagging more loosely than a soft toy over Jo’s left elbow, she suddenly looked very young - like a child, a brave child who had cuddled and nuzzled little Rocky as a kitten while his heart pumped delirium under her hand. Now she stared at him as though he was some unwanted present thrust upon her far too early. She was not ready for this. This was not what she’d had in mind, not right now, not ever. But it was a present she could not give back. Her elastic face contorted itself through a child’s gurning repertoire of pure pain until it came up with what looked like the right expression: betrayal.
It was some amateur magician’s sick trick, surely. It couldn’t be Rocky, could it? Not dead like that. What had happened to those nine lives? Where was that Tom and Jerry resilience? Reaching out across the barrier of Big Mum’s clasped arms, she grazed the fur of his now sagging paunch with the knuckles of her loose fist. She might have been pushing him away.
Big Mum drew her daughter back into her big arms, snuggling the bobbing head beneath the big breasts and searching for reassurance in Big Dad’s eyes, who, rooted on restless feet and trying to avoid hiding his own empty hands in his pockets, was a virtual doppelgänger in size and startled confusion; both had been rattled and were only slowly reclaiming balance and composure. What was the polite form in this scenario? With guests who deliver death to your doorstep? This couple (allies in a shared diet or some matchmaking gravitational pull) had come together to make this home and this child in it and this was their time; a time in which unwanted visitors, uninvited, unannounced, had exploded in on them like a nail bomb. Yet even in disaster there is humanity, the orphaned baby pulled from the rubble of the earthquake. They had sunk everything, their honest working lives, into this child and now she was giving them something in return by just standing there, quiet and brave. She was giving them everything. She looked like a sound investment.
Jo couldn’t take her eyes from the child who went on staring wide-eyed at Rocky as though still expecting him to squirm and elbow his way out of the arms of this whispering, hysterical woman.
Everyone else, however, was looking at Jo. And so was Mace. ‘I'm sorry…’ she was saying, her face working overtime to control a competing series of Tourette tics. "I'm sorry…’ she repeated, gripping mangled Rocky tighter and tighter as though afraid to give him up, as though she would take him away, have him repaired somehow and give him back later, fresh and new, bright and kittenish.
‘Don’t worry, love’ said someone, Big Mum in fact, with a certain empathy it seemed; but though her mouth struggled to form a sympathetic smile, Jo’s eyes drifted past her on a random journey around the room. The place was just too neat and the cat too much of a mess.
Finally, Big Dad, fully balanced at last, suddenly all bustle and business, failing to relieve her of the dead thing, led her out into the kitchen. From the end of the hall Mace watched him tenderly fan out a wide sheet of paper over the floor; Christmas wrapping paper, tube-fresh and curling up rebelliously as if it knew what was coming. Big Dad helped her spread Rocky across it like an awkwardly shaped present he’d struggle to wrap later, before hoisting himself upright with a sigh, slyly appreciating her legs (thought Mace) as her heels tapped out a hesitant pirouette on the tiled floor.
Back in the front room, Big Mum, still had the child trapped in the narrow space between mini bar and soundless TV (a forgotten cartoon splashing violent colour across the screen), their faces locked together side by side in a before-and-after while she muttered a soothing mantra or lullaby into the small, pink ear.
Breaking off from her crooning, she offered Mace a drink, as if this was how you attended to killers who brought your cat home dead. So they stood holding drinks and waiting for some conversation to happen. Rocky was two years old, she told him, he nodded and they were suddenly stuck with the story of the killing. There was only one subject between them. She didn't want to hear it and he didn't want to tell it, but there he was, trying to plead his innocence as though the family might be considering legal action. ‘Jo was driving’ he heard myself say at one point, looking back at the open door, where the kid must have slipped away; upstairs to release her sobs? Out into the street searching for the real Rocky?
As if she’d been listening from the hall, Jo now appeared, trailing Big Dad who was mumbling something ragged and consoling Mace didn't catch, some ‘Darn worry love, everyfink'll be awright.’ And, to the relief of Mace, stalling Big Mum’s casual interrogation: where did they live? How far? (What was she going to do, call the Police? Bin Paddy? Even the score?). Mace, however, was looking at the wide, dark stain across Jo's top, the damp cloth in Big Dad's hand, when a frustrated car horn caught everyone’s attention.
The whole operation moved itself out into the dark, cold road with a hurried walking chatter involving conflicting directions and instructions, aiding the killers to find their way home, or at least back the to the main road, Big Dad simultaneously keeping road rage to a simmer by redirecting angry headlights back up the narrow rat run to an unlit, almost invisible side road. Who, they wanted to know, would be taking the wheel? Immediately, Jo stopped to frisk herself with renewed hysteria. Seeing Mace produce the keys, she snatched them with a tight-lipped smile, simulating a sudden fit of suspicious composure to close down any further debate. Her face was stiff but she moved it mechanically from side to side, explaining how she ‘needed’ to drive, she ‘had’ to drive. She'd be all right. ‘Alright’ she said, echoing the returning Big Daddy’s ‘Awright, love?’, ‘Yes, yes, I’m alright now. I’m fine.’
Amazingly, the engine fired up first time, roaring like a 747. She eased back on the gas, paused as if to install night vision, then engaged gear. Rocky’s family, upright, watchful meerkats, faded into the dark of the side mirror as she cleared the road. At the first corner, however, she bumped the pavement and stalled. "You are alright?" asked Mace, distorting her mantra. She didn't even look at him. She raised her eyebrows and widened her lips until she was now almost smiling at last, amazed at herself, her head moving again, robotically from side to side. Maze had no idea whether this was yes or no.
She drove on steadily, easing through the maze of streets at walking pace with contemplative deliberation, learning how to drive all over again or perhaps considering, at every corner, turning back to Rocky’s house for a more detailed absolution. Slowly, however, the speed crept up until the hastily repacked bags were nudging his shoulder once more, pressing him to take control, do something.
As they swung out into the blaring horns and flashing lights of some arterial road, his skewed internal GPS had a vague idea where they were at last and they were not heading home. Jo, however, who now seemed to have lost her learner’s caution as well as any interest in the polite courtesy of the highway, looked as though she knew exactly where they were heading. She was going somewhere and she had to be there now, yesterday, last year. Mace now noticed how close they were to the centre of the road. It was hard not to notice this because she’d begun veering into the opposite lane and back again, her hands at ten to two lifting inches above the steering wheel, confirming a right-sided drift, and the shoddy workmanship in the garage. Shouting had no obvious effect, she had her foot down and just went on swinging in and out of any oncoming headlights. ‘You can't fucking kill us’ he heard himself say, but that was exactly what she could do, while he just sat there swearing in awe at the succession of blaring flares until in a rush he forced her off the wheel and got his foot in there on the brake and they spun in a manic gyro-skid before coming to a halt, the world outside contorted at a bewildering angle. They’d hit something bigger than Rocky this time.
Jo, however, hadn’t come to any halt; thwarted in climax, she was already pounding what she could reach of him in an awkward two-fisted frustration. Mace let her go on, offering no resistance, he was beyond all that, just kept his shoulder pressed to her, crushing her right up to the door until she couldn’t move. She was still for a while then, holding on to something unfinished, the way Paddy freezes after the first struggle has told you he doesn't want to be held, leaving you hugging a coiled spring of stalled violence.
Locked together, they remained a long time there in the dark (the interior lit by the occasional passing headlights), while he assessed the damage. Unable to see her face, it was a while before he became aware of the muffled sobs. When at last he released his hold, she remained still for a moment then bowed her head and really let go: loud, reckless sobbing, like a child. He put his arms around her again to draw her in, his thick blunt fingers kneading the muscles in her neck. It didn’t take such a great effort. What else could he do? They were stuck there and they couldn't drive away.
To be honest, his heart just wasn’t in it. He loved Jo, at least he assumed he did; love was after all a feeling, it was the most you could feel (wasn’t it?) but it was just a feeling and after ‘a year and two months’ (as she reminded him) there were other feelings beginning to offer a little competition.
Yes, kids looked fine, he told himself, fine. There they were, everywhere, all looking fine; from a distance. Kids are always good for a laugh, he’d say; and they love your laughter, they can't get enough of it, they can't stop laughing at it from their high chairs and low stools. Their blameless seduction was a survival instinct kicking in at birth: that first smile had you sliding into decisions without a moment’s hesitation, decisions guaranteed to change your life; forever. Kids are like that, they sell themselves; but they drive a hard bargain. They take away your life and give you a job and your job is not to fuck it up for them. You've got to keep the laughter rolling. The problem with kids, thought Mace (a thought he kept strictly to himself); the problem with kids is they make you think about yourself, and you start thinking in time, in years. And he’d begun to realise he couldn't think like that.
Mace really couldn’t think like that. To be honest, he was still a student in this thinking business, a truanting student. He was Mace; the single syllable tag itself, a legacy condensing the glory days of college, where controlled aggression (sometimes, let’s be totally honest here, not always quite so controlled) and a violence as sudden and uncompromising as the tag itself had offered him an image of himself which had seemed indelible (what his British ‘future father-in-law’ - Jesus - called, in his piss-assed British way, ‘Brighton Rock’, smiling at some secret humour from which Mace always felt excluded); an image which he’d seen systematically eroded along the short journey through his Twenties via a series of obscurely signposted compromises with life beyond the college gridiron; a legacy of what was becoming another life, a past life, a life which part of him, the biggest part, couldn’t believe he’d left behind.
He was, in fact, getting through a little more of this truanting, feeling sleepily settled, when he was blindsided by a tackle which left him a winded asthmatic. Pleasantly stretched out in the low-lit bedroom (in a flat his present salary alone could never secure), Paddy, Jo’s cat, curled up complacently on the pillow beside him, his mind replaying the afternoon classes with attentive middle-aged, mid-range gym bunnies, he’d just stalled into slo-mo the serious military crunches of that surprisingly agile blonde with the expensive hair and the easy laugh, replaying that discreet smile when Jo herself emerged from the bathroom like a magician’s assistant, hands clasped behind her back, feet pressed together, a hesitant, nervous smile pulling at her tightened lips, as if she’d just opened her mouth to sing (which she never did) and heard the opening notes spilling out in the wrong key.
In the days and long nights following her revelation, Mace slept like a baby; a baby who woke every two hours panting with a sense of profound foreboding. In his recurring dream he watched her lips telling him ‘Mason…You’re going to be a father.’ She hadn’t actually said these exact words, although she may have used the formal ‘Mason’ (which he heard like a mother’s reprimand), he just saw them in her face and, in the waking dark, replayed them so they felt relived, like a genuine memory; in future, he knew, it would be hard to tell the difference. Looking back, that wordless change in her face as she’d seen the look on his, carried the sense of a whole relationship passing through its final stages in seconds
But he was fine. She was fine. They’d had the talk. Mace’s talk; a coach’s half-time talk. She could do whatever she wanted, he’d told her at the end: ‘You do whatever you want. And whatever you decide…’ he’d said, leaving the sentence dangling while feeling nothing but the steel coil in his guts tightening in the long silence before she’d stopped twisting that thing in her hands and looked up with her nodding ‘It’s fine. I’ll be fine.’ ‘You will’ he’d confirmed, nodding with her and trying to hold down the tension in his voice, ‘You’ll be fine.’
And she was. ‘Fine. I’m fine.’ She’d repeated as three months later they negotiated the maze of duplicating hospital corridors, slowed by the dragging, scraping wheels of her suitcase, her limp arm clinging to his waist, like a jet-lagged refugee in Arrivals. It was disturbing, though surprisingly inevitable, to sense overwhelming relief down there within the mix of emotions greeting him when finally they found the sliding exit doors and shuddered into the sharp air of a December night.
This particular emotion, however, had found no correspondence in Jo, despite his serial ‘Don’t worry’s’, ‘never mind’s and ‘there’s ‘plenty of time’s’, the half-second of pursed lips simulating the nodding smile she knew he wanted to see did nothing to shift the weight she now carried from day to day. ‘Jeez, we’re no more than kids ourselves’ was a line he declined instinctively, though if he was thinking, if he wasn’t trying to kid himself, it was the solitary driver for his motivation. ‘We can always try again’, was the one comforting cliche he couldn’t bring himself to deliver.
The words, spoken and unspoken, were of course, just words, failing either to comfort her or suppress the new, alien awareness developing like an embryo within himself; as though he had deleted something he would only at some future moment recognise as precious.
However, after a long, listless week of mourning, wrapped in a tight chrysalis of bedsheets, one bright day she awoke suddenly before him into the form of a newly recharged woman; a woman he barely recognised. Like a rebirth, he thought, without a trace of irony but warily avoiding saying the word aloud, as day by day he found himself often having to second guess what lay beneath this brisk, bright, detached persona he usually associated with converted Christians; guesswork compounded by a seemingly genuine distance which had somehow grown between them.
A distance which even now made him shift uneasily beside her tense body in the stalled MG; well, shift as far as the Mace body might in the small car’s cramping claustrophobia; the ‘classic’ MG, Daddy’s present and her ‘baby’, acting up like a temperamental toddler having been deserted for an hour at the far end of the darkening car park. She twisted the ignition again, then again then looked up, expressionless, at the woman who'd crammed and compacted each of her green designer holdalls with such painfully slow deliberation ahead of them at the check-out, she might have really been packing bags for life, rather than Christmas; now planted by outrageous coincidence on the edge of their headlights, she was feeding toddlers and tots, Teds and trikes just as slowly into her Range Rover. Mace could only guess at the narrow spectrum of emotions settling itself within Jo’s head, her eyes glittering stones. her mouth hardening over a determined silence. He wanted to take over the driving but he already knew her response.
Instinctively, he placed a calming hand on her knee before remembering he no longer had a calming hand. She ignored the loose grip just resting there until he took it away, holding herself quite still, her eyes fixed unblinking at the logo of the steering wheel. A door slammed, kids swarmed restlessly over the back seats. The Range Rover, however, remained where it was, its driver presumably double checking an inventory of passengers and purchases. With an angry snort, Jo gave the key another vicious twist As if it had been waiting for just such a reaction, that little spark of violence, the engine responded with some aggression of its own, shrugging off its passive sulk and climbing up the escalator of juvenile defiance. It shot back from the bay, slickly failing to strip the shine off the BMW parked over-intimately beside them; arced with a shudder of gears before accelerating toward the exit, slaloming between the silver ghost of a juddering trolley and two sets of dawdling headlights scanning the aisles for the same elusive space, before screeching to a standstill at the barrier, teasingly out of arms reach of the booth. Jo wrenched open the icy door but still had to free herself from the dysfunctional seatbelt before she could hand over her ticket.
Slamming the door, she hiccupped over the hard speed hump at the exit, wrestled the wheel into a combative right, two hard, honking lefts (‘Yeah, Yeah,Yeah, fuck you too’) then another right in third, muscling past the startled shrieks of rapidly blinking headlights, until deceptively slowing to cruise speed, the cowering speedometer needle shivering just below insanity, as they channelled through pulsing jewels of misty neon at no more than a score above the legal limit .
‘Jo…?’ said Mace, meaningfully, but occupied in fielding the debris slipping over his shoulder from the carelessly overfilled bags packed in behind him, a can of Whiskas in his right hand, he could hear the single all-purpose syllable of command, realising it no longer carried the weight of authority, turning itself subserviently into a question.
‘What?’ Relishing the release afforded by her ascending reply, she repeated it with mock innocence, while driving her foot down even harder. ‘What? What?’ Headlights heading towards them blurred into exploding stars, shooting stars, meteorites.
‘Jo’ the stub of her name now a warning, all subtlety lost under the turbo roar taking them god knows where.
‘What?’ (or ‘Wha-tah’) the stressed ’t', a warning, in turn, to back off.
Another J was on the tip of his tongue now, as in ‘Jesus, what the fuck…’, but it was a tongue he was keen to bite as he watched the white lines shooting beneath them like the addled dreamscape of a coke insomniac. He didn't want to start something now, not here, not now.
‘What’s with the engine?’ had almost slipped out, just as an observation, just to keep things light and smooth. Its delinquent growl seemed high pitched, grating. But the needle still shivering at fifty in these narrow urban streets told him he'd better keep his observations to himself. We've got the thing started, he thought, let's just get back. Let's just get off the road before it really opens up.
And it was cold. She’d had the heater fixed three days before and three hours after the garage had closed for the weekend it had failed again. ‘You fix it’ she’d told him as he’d idly inspected the braille of the dashboard, working the tiny lever, trying to dial in some response. ‘It’s an old car’ he shrugged by way of consoling diagnosis. She’d just looked at him. This was her car, her baby; which was why his hands now remained firmly in his pockets, his collar up and his smart mouth closed.
‘Bitch’ she shout-whispered into the dark interior, her eyes fixed on whatever she could see of the road ahead, the lights slipping from amber to red as the MG swooped through the thankfully empty crossing. ‘And that lame-brain on the checkout: ‘Let them through, love’ Oh, thought Mace, that bitch. ‘Let them through. Let them through? Can you believe it?’ The question required no response; any simulation of interaction was foolish illusion, all the questions were rhetorical in this monologue. ’I mean, what? What is this? Let them through…What are they, a fucking passport?Fucking zombie. Did you see her? I mean, did you see her? Can’t control her own fucking kids and somehow she’s a fucking martyr. Deal with them, bitch! Don’t have them if you can’t deal with them.’
Mace knew what she wanted with this bitch business. She wanted it to start all over again, but she didn’t want to start it. He dug his hands deeper into his pockets while she tap-tapped her nails on the wheel as the thickening traffic forced her speed down. She's going to say something, he thought, she's going to start in again now. He turned on the radio. Some Soul diva ooh-oohing through a climax. In one slick motion, Jo twisted the volume to almost nothing.
‘We’ve forgotten something.’ she stated, coldly, firmly, her voice suspiciously calm. They spent a long pause listening to the engine, muttering to itself now at a straggling jog. ’We’ve forgotten something. What is it?’
He answered her as though it was a real question. How would he know? How much food do you need for three days? They'd never spent Christmas alone and the car was packed with enough ham and turkey, Whiskas and Brekkies for a siege - just in case. Just in case of what, there was some festive run on cat food? If there was, Paddy was going to be all right. Paddy wasn't going to suffer. They were there to see to that. They were there to look after him. 'No one else would', that's why they were there. Someone probably would, some neighbour, some cattery, but Jo wouldn't let them. She was taking no risks with Paddy. Nothing was going to happen to Paddy. They would not be seeing ‘Mum and Dad’, nor Katie (Jo’s younger, fertile sister), nor the new baby, for whom Katie seemed to think ‘Christmas had been created’.
‘I'm glad we're staying home. It's a relief….Champagne in bed.’ she said over-brightly, wrenching the gear stick. ‘I'll call Mum as soon as we get in.’
He was looking at her legs, the black coat open, the tight skirt riding high up her thigh. His hand, pausing with its too brief request on her knee, began sliding questioningly into the warm, widening, gear-shifting V. Looking straight ahead, her face didn't alter.
‘Julie looked well, didn't she? What good legs those dancers have. No breasts, but good legs.’
The hand froze, reluctantly returning to the meagre warmth of his pocket, feeling out the phone which, safely on silent, suddenly began trembling again like a vibrator between his fingers. His grip tightened until he seemed to squeeze it into submission. Some Christmas.
The traffic was now reduced to walking pace and for some distance they trailed another Range Rover or maybe the same one they’d left in Waitrose. A diminutive, blonde girl was lazily wiping a port-hole in the steamed back window, pressing her lips against the glass then wiping it again, her hands moving like a bored mime. Catching sight of them suddenly broke her trance and she began waving or maybe just rubbed harder, it was hard to tell. Mace didn't need to look at Jo's face.
The traffic ground to a standstill and slowly the dreamy smile faded from the child’s face. Her hand was still waving, wearily wiping at the ever sealing hole in the back window while her mind had drifted elsewhere; Christmas perhaps. Jo pulled the MG left and down a puzzle of narrow streets.
More kids. Hovering in the half-light They were everywhere. Someone was planting them on every corner, on skates and skateboards, on bikes and trikes. Jo was racing them down these cramped streets cramped further by lines of kerb-hugging cars. Mace couldn’t tell where they were heading, Some remembered rat-run? He just hoped Jo had some idea. Let it go, he thought, let her run it off. What can happen? She can only kill us.
He could see it all before it happened, in the lagged time-warp of every accident: the girl on her BMX, accelerating down the slope of her parallel pavement track, fat tyres bumping and bobbing as she pumped harder and faster, Halloween luminous in the dimmed streetlight, knees and elbow guards flashing, backside rising from the saddle with urgent effort as she began tip-toeing in a sort of bad-dream underwater strangeness. Suddenly lost behind a bumper to bumper chain of darkened cars, she shot out again incredibly into the road ahead.
It didn't feel like an accident. It felt as though they'd skidded past the danger. The suspension had suffered a little hiccup on the right hand side where some aborted squeal had been flung out somewhere behind. They'd been lucky, the girl veering at speed across the edge of the emergency stop, had been lucky, it had just been a warning. The girl had disappeared, the car was at a standstill. Jo would drive on now, more slowly; chastened at last.
They waited, listening to their own panicked breathing, silently assessing the psychic damage. Jo knew what it was. Jo knew exactly what it was. Mace didn't want to know. He wanted to be home, home and free, out of this. He lay back where the belt had wrenched him into place, hands still in his pockets, fruit and veg and god knows what else in his lap. He was not going to move. But she just sat there, upright, straight-backed staring at the wheel until he got out of the car.
The street was strangely silent, the air sharp and sobering but he didn't have to walk far back up the frosted tarmac. At the fading end of snaking skid marks, a small, dark bundle lay starkly exposed beneath the weak, silver glow of the streetlight. He wasn’t used to seeing dead things, but this thing was very dead, even he could see that. Crushed sideways as if caught stretching into deeper sleep, he could feel the whole weight of the thing against his foot as he tried to ease it out of sight under the side of a parked car.
‘What are you doing?’
She was watching him in the wing mirror as she reversed, his door still open. It's nothing, he wanted to tell her, just a hunk of ripped tyre, happens all the time round here, people use the place like a racetrack. But she knew very well what it was.
‘It's a cat’, was what he told her. She said nothing.
This was silent interrogation and he hadn't given her what she wanted, anything like what she wanted. He knew he had to go through the business of a full inspection: the bared teeth, the plumped belly. Yes, it was a tabby, just like Paddy. Exactly like Paddy, a little smaller maybe, a little younger. Yes, maybe like Paddy’s little brother. Yes, it had a collar: a medallion, flashing and blurring under its chin as it resisted his fingering. Of course, it had everything: name (Rocky - what was this, some sort of Macho Latino of the feline world?) address, even a telephone number for any cool bitch who got lucky (she was out beside him now with her phone torch, squatting over the body on the icy tarmac). This was a cat with a home all right. But it was a dead cat now. It looked like a very dead cat, with a very sick look on its face. This is it, he thought, we've killed Rocky on his own manor.
‘We've got to give it back’ she said, as though she'd actually been considering taking it home (Mace loved the 'We').
‘What? Are you serious?’ he said, watching her gently, lovingly scoop the thing up, its heavy head drooping over her elbow. Oh fuck, he thought. Where’s that mad cyclist? It was her fault, her problem. She should be here to deal with it. She should be taking some responsibility.
Jo, however, had already left him and the car in the middle of the deserted street. He felt the hard, cold edge of the open door but instead of climbing in and driving away (out of there, right now, before it was too late). He slammed it shut, put the keys in his pocket and looked around helplessly for Jo, already backing her way in through the gate of one of the terraced houses..
The curtained bay window, like several in the street, glowed with a warm internal stillness of festive greens and reds but in the silence of the pause after Jo, struggling with the dead body, finally reached the bell with its two note descending chime, it seemed (or Mace hoped) no one was home. However, just as Jo took a step back a curtain lifted in the window and a face appeared, a small face, a child's face framed by its border of artificial snow as roughly sprayed as a pre-school project.
A woman with a very big face opened the door. Mace thought woman rather than girl although she looked not much older than Jo. When she saw the bundle limply draped across Jo’s level arms like a religious offering, her mouth made the same O shape as her eyes. She covered it quickly with a big soprano hand while her big soprano body made an excellent job of blocking the doorway; her hips just failing to prevent a little girl's head determinedly squeezing through. Je-sus, thought Mace, there are just too many kids in this world.
Inside it was suddenly Christmas. A face-tingling aura of warm air sucked them into a daze of domestic bliss; a low-lit grotto hung with twists of tinsel and chains of luminous miniature lanterns wreathing the walls, mirrors, and, by the window, the stilled chaos of the tree. The place was a furniture showroom offering the exact simulation of a festive family home (poor but honest, simple but proud). Womb-like, thought Mace; of course, why wouldn’t it be? Yes, this was most definitely a loving home for little Rocky; with an obligatory loving family, more of whom were appearing with every embarrassed twist and turn, the walls closing in with each startled cry from each new arrival, repeating his name as if they couldn't quite believe it either: ‘Rocky?’, ‘Rocky?’ It was a debate in a Stallone convention where no one remembered the dynamic narrative structure of First Blood. Come on, Mace thought, what did you expect? If you'd given him some other name he might still be alive and curled up on the sofa. Where cats were supposed to be. What was he doing out there, his little muscles braced against a speeding hunk of angry sports car, if not trying to live up to his macho image? Big Dad, raising his soft weight from his favourite armchair, was no obvious boxing fan, but someone here was responsible for that handle.
When the smallest child appeared from the hall, peeling herself slowly from the diminutive silhouette in the doorway, the ragged chorus came to an abrupt halt.
Of course the child was hand-picked too. Waist high and dry-eyed, elbowing gently free of Big Mum’s helplessly protective arms, she stood centre stage, directly in front of Jo as if in awe, her mouth opening in quizzical slow-motion while the audience held its breath for the soundtrack to kick in. Mace recognised her as the face in the window. About eight or nine, a bob of red hair and the tough little tomboy look of an embryonic Feminist. Dressed in the standard outfit of an off-duty gymnast, she looked tough, but not too tough for luminous knee and elbow guards. He looked a long time at these, while her wide eyes, angled upward, flipped from Rocky to Jo and back again, calibrating this strange unimagined image or perhaps sighting her aim for the stillborn scream.
When she reached out to touch, or almost touch the head sagging more loosely than a soft toy over Jo’s left elbow, she suddenly looked very young - like a child, a brave child who had cuddled and nuzzled little Rocky as a kitten while his heart pumped delirium under her hand. Now she stared at him as though he was some unwanted present thrust upon her far too early. She was not ready for this. This was not what she’d had in mind, not right now, not ever. But it was a present she could not give back. Her elastic face contorted itself through a child’s gurning repertoire of pure pain until it came up with what looked like the right expression: betrayal.
It was some amateur magician’s sick trick, surely. It couldn’t be Rocky, could it? Not dead like that. What had happened to those nine lives? Where was that Tom and Jerry resilience? Reaching out across the barrier of Big Mum’s clasped arms, she grazed the fur of his now sagging paunch with the knuckles of her loose fist. She might have been pushing him away.
Big Mum drew her daughter back into her big arms, snuggling the bobbing head beneath the big breasts and searching for reassurance in Big Dad’s eyes, who, rooted on restless feet and trying to avoid hiding his own empty hands in his pockets, was a virtual doppelgänger in size and startled confusion; both had been rattled and were only slowly reclaiming balance and composure. What was the polite form in this scenario? With guests who deliver death to your doorstep? This couple (allies in a shared diet or some matchmaking gravitational pull) had come together to make this home and this child in it and this was their time; a time in which unwanted visitors, uninvited, unannounced, had exploded in on them like a nail bomb. Yet even in disaster there is humanity, the orphaned baby pulled from the rubble of the earthquake. They had sunk everything, their honest working lives, into this child and now she was giving them something in return by just standing there, quiet and brave. She was giving them everything. She looked like a sound investment.
Jo couldn’t take her eyes from the child who went on staring wide-eyed at Rocky as though still expecting him to squirm and elbow his way out of the arms of this whispering, hysterical woman.
Everyone else, however, was looking at Jo. And so was Mace. ‘I'm sorry…’ she was saying, her face working overtime to control a competing series of Tourette tics. "I'm sorry…’ she repeated, gripping mangled Rocky tighter and tighter as though afraid to give him up, as though she would take him away, have him repaired somehow and give him back later, fresh and new, bright and kittenish.
‘Don’t worry, love’ said someone, Big Mum in fact, with a certain empathy it seemed; but though her mouth struggled to form a sympathetic smile, Jo’s eyes drifted past her on a random journey around the room. The place was just too neat and the cat too much of a mess.
Finally, Big Dad, fully balanced at last, suddenly all bustle and business, failing to relieve her of the dead thing, led her out into the kitchen. From the end of the hall Mace watched him tenderly fan out a wide sheet of paper over the floor; Christmas wrapping paper, tube-fresh and curling up rebelliously as if it knew what was coming. Big Dad helped her spread Rocky across it like an awkwardly shaped present he’d struggle to wrap later, before hoisting himself upright with a sigh, slyly appreciating her legs (thought Mace) as her heels tapped out a hesitant pirouette on the tiled floor.
Back in the front room, Big Mum, still had the child trapped in the narrow space between mini bar and soundless TV (a forgotten cartoon splashing violent colour across the screen), their faces locked together side by side in a before-and-after while she muttered a soothing mantra or lullaby into the small, pink ear.
Breaking off from her crooning, she offered Mace a drink, as if this was how you attended to killers who brought your cat home dead. So they stood holding drinks and waiting for some conversation to happen. Rocky was two years old, she told him, he nodded and they were suddenly stuck with the story of the killing. There was only one subject between them. She didn't want to hear it and he didn't want to tell it, but there he was, trying to plead his innocence as though the family might be considering legal action. ‘Jo was driving’ he heard myself say at one point, looking back at the open door, where the kid must have slipped away; upstairs to release her sobs? Out into the street searching for the real Rocky?
As if she’d been listening from the hall, Jo now appeared, trailing Big Dad who was mumbling something ragged and consoling Mace didn't catch, some ‘Darn worry love, everyfink'll be awright.’ And, to the relief of Mace, stalling Big Mum’s casual interrogation: where did they live? How far? (What was she going to do, call the Police? Bin Paddy? Even the score?). Mace, however, was looking at the wide, dark stain across Jo's top, the damp cloth in Big Dad's hand, when a frustrated car horn caught everyone’s attention.
The whole operation moved itself out into the dark, cold road with a hurried walking chatter involving conflicting directions and instructions, aiding the killers to find their way home, or at least back the to the main road, Big Dad simultaneously keeping road rage to a simmer by redirecting angry headlights back up the narrow rat run to an unlit, almost invisible side road. Who, they wanted to know, would be taking the wheel? Immediately, Jo stopped to frisk herself with renewed hysteria. Seeing Mace produce the keys, she snatched them with a tight-lipped smile, simulating a sudden fit of suspicious composure to close down any further debate. Her face was stiff but she moved it mechanically from side to side, explaining how she ‘needed’ to drive, she ‘had’ to drive. She'd be all right. ‘Alright’ she said, echoing the returning Big Daddy’s ‘Awright, love?’, ‘Yes, yes, I’m alright now. I’m fine.’
Amazingly, the engine fired up first time, roaring like a 747. She eased back on the gas, paused as if to install night vision, then engaged gear. Rocky’s family, upright, watchful meerkats, faded into the dark of the side mirror as she cleared the road. At the first corner, however, she bumped the pavement and stalled. "You are alright?" asked Mace, distorting her mantra. She didn't even look at him. She raised her eyebrows and widened her lips until she was now almost smiling at last, amazed at herself, her head moving again, robotically from side to side. Maze had no idea whether this was yes or no.
She drove on steadily, easing through the maze of streets at walking pace with contemplative deliberation, learning how to drive all over again or perhaps considering, at every corner, turning back to Rocky’s house for a more detailed absolution. Slowly, however, the speed crept up until the hastily repacked bags were nudging his shoulder once more, pressing him to take control, do something.
As they swung out into the blaring horns and flashing lights of some arterial road, his skewed internal GPS had a vague idea where they were at last and they were not heading home. Jo, however, who now seemed to have lost her learner’s caution as well as any interest in the polite courtesy of the highway, looked as though she knew exactly where they were heading. She was going somewhere and she had to be there now, yesterday, last year. Mace now noticed how close they were to the centre of the road. It was hard not to notice this because she’d begun veering into the opposite lane and back again, her hands at ten to two lifting inches above the steering wheel, confirming a right-sided drift, and the shoddy workmanship in the garage. Shouting had no obvious effect, she had her foot down and just went on swinging in and out of any oncoming headlights. ‘You can't fucking kill us’ he heard himself say, but that was exactly what she could do, while he just sat there swearing in awe at the succession of blaring flares until in a rush he forced her off the wheel and got his foot in there on the brake and they spun in a manic gyro-skid before coming to a halt, the world outside contorted at a bewildering angle. They’d hit something bigger than Rocky this time.
Jo, however, hadn’t come to any halt; thwarted in climax, she was already pounding what she could reach of him in an awkward two-fisted frustration. Mace let her go on, offering no resistance, he was beyond all that, just kept his shoulder pressed to her, crushing her right up to the door until she couldn’t move. She was still for a while then, holding on to something unfinished, the way Paddy freezes after the first struggle has told you he doesn't want to be held, leaving you hugging a coiled spring of stalled violence.
Locked together, they remained a long time there in the dark (the interior lit by the occasional passing headlights), while he assessed the damage. Unable to see her face, it was a while before he became aware of the muffled sobs. When at last he released his hold, she remained still for a moment then bowed her head and really let go: loud, reckless sobbing, like a child. He put his arms around her again to draw her in, his thick blunt fingers kneading the muscles in her neck. It didn’t take such a great effort. What else could he do? They were stuck there and they couldn't drive away.
Rocky IX
Christmas is for kids, and for some time now this had been a bad time for Mace. Don't get me wrong, he’d say, he liked kids. He liked the little hands, the little feet, the wobbling heads, the gurgling gibberish, parent-smart bullying from the thrones of supermarket trolleys (‘Now. Now. Feeties, now!’). ‘Cute’ he’d murmur, not completely reluctantly, as Jo’s straight-backed, English nanny tone directed him (‘Look, Mason, look’), her grip tightening meaningfully on his arm as they watched yet another small, sloppy mouth widening and widening like a baby python’s over a complacent Teddy's mitten-hand or an earnest face, gripped for a moment in a pop-eyed struggle with wind before breaking into startled joy; with a now slightly over-familiar squeeze of his waist, she brought him to a halt before bandy-legged, stuttering runs, hysterical romps with durable puppies and terrified cats, short stubby arms stretched out for more, more, more. ‘Cute’ he’d tell her and often mean it, although increasingly hearing a self-conscious, pacifying tone working its way into his voice.
To be honest, his heart just wasn’t in it. He loved Jo, at least he assumed he did; love was after all a feeling, it was the most you could feel (wasn’t it?) but it was just a feeling and after ‘a year and two months’ (as she reminded him) there were other feelings beginning to offer a little competition.
Yes, kids looked fine, he told himself, fine. There they were, everywhere, all looking fine; from a distance. Kids are always good for a laugh, he’d say; and they love your laughter, they can't get enough of it, they can't stop laughing at it from their high chairs and low stools. Their blameless seduction was a survival instinct kicking in at birth: that first smile had you sliding into decisions without a moment’s hesitation, decisions guaranteed to change your life; forever. Kids are like that, they sell themselves; but they drive a hard bargain. They take away your life and give you a job and your job is not to fuck it up for them. You've got to keep the laughter rolling. The problem with kids, thought Mace (a thought he kept strictly to himself); the problem with kids is they make you think about yourself, and you start thinking in time, in years. And he’d begun to realise he couldn't think like that.
Mace really couldn’t think like that. To be honest, he was still a student in this thinking business, a truanting student. He was Mace; the single syllable tag itself, a legacy condensing the glory days of college, where controlled aggression (sometimes, let’s be totally honest here, not always quite so controlled) and a violence as sudden and uncompromising as the tag itself had offered him an image of himself which had seemed indelible (what his British ‘future father-in-law’ - Jesus - called, in his piss-assed British way, ‘Brighton Rock’, smiling at some secret humour from which Mace always felt excluded); an image which he’d seen systematically eroded along the short journey through his Twenties via a series of obscurely signposted compromises with life beyond the college gridiron; a legacy of what was becoming another life, a past life, a life which part of him, the biggest part, couldn’t believe he’d left behind.
He was, in fact, getting through a little more of this truanting, feeling sleepily settled, when he was blindsided by a tackle which left him a winded asthmatic. Pleasantly stretched out in the low-lit bedroom (in a flat his present salary alone could never secure), Paddy, Jo’s cat, curled up complacently on the pillow beside him, his mind replaying the afternoon classes with attentive middle-aged, mid-range gym bunnies, he’d just stalled into slo-mo the serious military crunches of that surprisingly agile blonde with the expensive hair and the easy laugh, replaying that discreet smile when Jo herself emerged from the bathroom like a magician’s assistant, hands clasped behind her back, feet pressed together, a hesitant, nervous smile pulling at her tightened lips, as if she’d just opened her mouth to sing (which she never did) and heard the opening notes spilling out in the wrong key.
In the days and long nights following her revelation, Mace slept like a baby; a baby who woke every two hours panting with a sense of profound foreboding. In his recurring dream he watched her lips telling him ‘Mason…You’re going to be a father.’ She hadn’t actually said these exact words, although she may have used the formal ‘Mason’ (which he heard like a mother’s reprimand), he just saw them in her face and, in the waking dark, replayed them so they felt relived, like a genuine memory; in future, he knew, it would be hard to tell the difference. Looking back, that wordless change in her face as she’d seen the look on his, carried the sense of a whole relationship passing through its final stages in seconds
But he was fine. She was fine. They’d had the talk. Mace’s talk; a coach’s half-time talk. She could do whatever she wanted, he’d told her at the end: ‘You do whatever you want. And whatever you decide…’ he’d said, leaving the sentence dangling while feeling nothing but the steel coil in his guts tightening in the long silence before she’d stopped twisting that thing in her hands and looked up with her nodding ‘It’s fine. I’ll be fine.’ ‘You will’ he’d confirmed, nodding with her and trying to hold down the tension in his voice, ‘You’ll be fine.’
And she was. ‘Fine. I’m fine.’ She’d repeated as three months later they negotiated the maze of duplicating hospital corridors, slowed by the dragging, scraping wheels of her suitcase, her limp arm clinging to his waist, like a jet-lagged refugee in Arrivals. It was disturbing, though surprisingly inevitable, to sense overwhelming relief down there within the mix of emotions greeting him when finally they found the sliding exit doors and shuddered into the sharp air of a December night.
This particular emotion, however, had found no correspondence in Jo, despite his serial ‘Don’t worry’s’, ‘never mind’s and ‘there’s ‘plenty of time’s’, the half-second of pursed lips simulating the nodding smile she knew he wanted to see did nothing to shift the weight she now carried from day to day. ‘Jeez, we’re no more than kids ourselves’ was a line he declined instinctively, though if he was thinking, if he wasn’t trying to kid himself, it was the solitary driver for his motivation. ‘We can always try again’, was the one comforting cliche he couldn’t bring himself to deliver.
The words, spoken and unspoken, were of course, just words, failing either to comfort her or suppress the new, alien awareness developing like an embryo within himself; as though he had deleted something he would only at some future moment recognise as precious.
However, after a long, listless week of mourning, wrapped in a tight chrysalis of bedsheets, one bright day she awoke suddenly before him into the form of a newly recharged woman; a woman he barely recognised. Like a rebirth, he thought, without a trace of irony but warily avoiding saying the word aloud, as day by day he found himself often having to second guess what lay beneath this brisk, bright, detached persona he usually associated with converted Christians; guesswork compounded by a seemingly genuine distance which had somehow grown between them.
A distance which even now made him shift uneasily beside her tense body in the stalled MG; well, shift as far as the Mace body might in the small car’s cramping claustrophobia; the ‘classic’ MG, Daddy’s present and her ‘baby’, acting up like a temperamental toddler having been deserted for an hour at the far end of the darkening car park. She twisted the ignition again, then again then looked up, expressionless, at the woman who'd crammed and compacted each of her green designer holdalls with such painfully slow deliberation ahead of them at the check-out, she might have really been packing bags for life, rather than Christmas; now planted by outrageous coincidence on the edge of their headlights, she was feeding toddlers and tots, Teds and trikes just as slowly into her Range Rover. Mace could only guess at the narrow spectrum of emotions settling itself within Jo’s head, her eyes glittering stones. her mouth hardening over a determined silence. He wanted to take over the driving but he already knew her response.
Instinctively, he placed a calming hand on her knee before remembering he no longer had a calming hand. She ignored the loose grip just resting there until he took it away, holding herself quite still, her eyes fixed unblinking at the logo of the steering wheel. A door slammed, kids swarmed restlessly over the back seats. The Range Rover, however, remained where it was, its driver presumably double checking an inventory of passengers and purchases. With an angry snort, Jo gave the key another vicious twist As if it had been waiting for just such a reaction, that little spark of violence, the engine responded with some aggression of its own, shrugging off its passive sulk and climbing up the escalator of juvenile defiance. It shot back from the bay, slickly failing to strip the shine off the BMW parked over-intimately beside them; arced with a shudder of gears before accelerating toward the exit, slaloming between the silver ghost of a juddering trolley and two sets of dawdling headlights scanning the aisles for the same elusive space, before screeching to a standstill at the barrier, teasingly out of arms reach of the booth. Jo wrenched open the icy door but still had to free herself from the dysfunctional seatbelt before she could hand over her ticket.
Slamming the door, she hiccupped over the hard speed hump at the exit, wrestled the wheel into a combative right, two hard, honking lefts (‘Yeah, Yeah,Yeah, fuck you too’) then another right in third, muscling past the startled shrieks of rapidly blinking headlights, until deceptively slowing to cruise speed, the cowering speedometer needle shivering just below insanity, as they channelled through pulsing jewels of misty neon at no more than a score above the legal limit .
‘Jo…?’ said Mace, meaningfully, but occupied in fielding the debris slipping over his shoulder from the carelessly overfilled bags packed in behind him, a can of Whiskas in his right hand, he could hear the single all-purpose syllable of command, realising it no longer carried the weight of authority, turning itself subserviently into a question.
‘What?’ Relishing the release afforded by her ascending reply, she repeated it with mock innocence, while driving her foot down even harder. ‘What? What?’ Headlights heading towards them blurred into exploding stars, shooting stars, meteorites.
‘Jo’ the stub of her name now a warning, all subtlety lost under the turbo roar taking them god knows where.
‘What?’ (or ‘Wha-tah’) the stressed ’t', a warning, in turn, to back off.
Another J was on the tip of his tongue now, as in ‘Jesus, what the fuck…’, but it was a tongue he was keen to bite as he watched the white lines shooting beneath them like the addled dreamscape of a coke insomniac. He didn't want to start something now, not here, not now.
‘What’s with the engine?’ had almost slipped out, just as an observation, just to keep things light and smooth. Its delinquent growl seemed high pitched, grating. But the needle still shivering at fifty in these narrow urban streets told him he'd better keep his observations to himself. We've got the thing started, he thought, let's just get back. Let's just get off the road before it really opens up.
And it was cold. She’d had the heater fixed three days before and three hours after the garage had closed for the weekend it had failed again. ‘You fix it’ she’d told him as he’d idly inspected the braille of the dashboard, working the tiny lever, trying to dial in some response. ‘It’s an old car’ he shrugged by way of consoling diagnosis. She’d just looked at him. This was her car, her baby; which was why his hands now remained firmly in his pockets, his collar up and his smart mouth closed.
‘Bitch’ she shout-whispered into the dark interior, her eyes fixed on whatever she could see of the road ahead, the lights slipping from amber to red as the MG swooped through the thankfully empty crossing. ‘And that lame-brain on the checkout: ‘Let them through, love’ Oh, thought Mace, that bitch. ‘Let them through. Let them through? Can you believe it?’ The question required no response; any simulation of interaction was foolish illusion, all the questions were rhetorical in this monologue. ’I mean, what? What is this? Let them through…What are they, a fucking passport?Fucking zombie. Did you see her? I mean, did you see her? Can’t control her own fucking kids and somehow she’s a fucking martyr. Deal with them, bitch! Don’t have them if you can’t deal with them.’
Mace knew what she wanted with this bitch business. She wanted it to start all over again, but she didn’t want to start it. He dug his hands deeper into his pockets while she tap-tapped her nails on the wheel as the thickening traffic forced her speed down. She's going to say something, he thought, she's going to start in again now. He turned on the radio. Some Soul diva ooh-oohing through a climax. In one slick motion, Jo twisted the volume to almost nothing.
‘We’ve forgotten something.’ she stated, coldly, firmly, her voice suspiciously calm. They spent a long pause listening to the engine, muttering to itself now at a straggling jog. ’We’ve forgotten something. What is it?’
He answered her as though it was a real question. How would he know? How much food do you need for three days? They'd never spent Christmas alone and the car was packed with enough ham and turkey, Whiskas and Brekkies for a siege - just in case. Just in case of what, there was some festive run on cat food? If there was, Paddy was going to be all right. Paddy wasn't going to suffer. They were there to see to that. They were there to look after him. 'No one else would', that's why they were there. Someone probably would, some neighbour, some cattery, but Jo wouldn't let them. She was taking no risks with Paddy. Nothing was going to happen to Paddy. They would not be seeing ‘Mum and Dad’, nor Katie (Jo’s younger, fertile sister), nor the new baby, for whom Katie seemed to think ‘Christmas had been created’.
‘I'm glad we're staying home. It's a relief….Champagne in bed.’ she said over-brightly, wrenching the gear stick. ‘I'll call Mum as soon as we get in.’
He was looking at her legs, the black coat open, the tight skirt riding high up her thigh. His hand, pausing with its too brief request on her knee, began sliding questioningly into the warm, widening, gear-shifting V. Looking straight ahead, her face didn't alter.
‘Julie looked well, didn't she? What good legs those dancers have. No breasts, but good legs.’
The hand froze, reluctantly returning to the meagre warmth of his pocket, feeling out the phone which, safely on silent, suddenly began trembling again like a vibrator between his fingers. His grip tightened until he seemed to squeeze it into submission. Some Christmas.
The traffic was now reduced to walking pace and for some distance they trailed another Range Rover or maybe the same one they’d left in Waitrose. A diminutive, blonde girl was lazily wiping a port-hole in the steamed back window, pressing her lips against the glass then wiping it again, her hands moving like a bored mime. Catching sight of them suddenly broke her trance and she began waving or maybe just rubbed harder, it was hard to tell. Mace didn't need to look at Jo's face.
The traffic ground to a standstill and slowly the dreamy smile faded from the child’s face. Her hand was still waving, wearily wiping at the ever sealing hole in the back window while her mind had drifted elsewhere; Christmas perhaps. Jo pulled the MG left and down a puzzle of narrow streets.
More kids. Hovering in the half-light They were everywhere. Someone was planting them on every corner, on skates and skateboards, on bikes and trikes. Jo was racing them down these cramped streets cramped further by lines of kerb-hugging cars. Mace couldn’t tell where they were heading, Some remembered rat-run? He just hoped Jo had some idea. Let it go, he thought, let her run it off. What can happen? She can only kill us.
He could see it all before it happened, in the lagged time-warp of every accident: the girl on her BMX, accelerating down the slope of her parallel pavement track, fat tyres bumping and bobbing as she pumped harder and faster, Halloween luminous in the dimmed streetlight, knees and elbow guards flashing, backside rising from the saddle with urgent effort as she began tip-toeing in a sort of bad-dream underwater strangeness. Suddenly lost behind a bumper to bumper chain of darkened cars, she shot out again incredibly into the road ahead.
It didn't feel like an accident. It felt as though they'd skidded past the danger. The suspension had suffered a little hiccup on the right hand side where some aborted squeal had been flung out somewhere behind. They'd been lucky, the girl veering at speed across the edge of the emergency stop, had been lucky, it had just been a warning. The girl had disappeared, the car was at a standstill. Jo would drive on now, more slowly; chastened at last.
They waited, listening to their own panicked breathing, silently assessing the psychic damage. Jo knew what it was. Jo knew exactly what it was. Mace didn't want to know. He wanted to be home, home and free, out of this. He lay back where the belt had wrenched him into place, hands still in his pockets, fruit and veg and god knows what else in his lap. He was not going to move. But she just sat there, upright, straight-backed staring at the wheel until he got out of the car.
The street was strangely silent, the air sharp and sobering but he didn't have to walk far back up the frosted tarmac. At the fading end of snaking skid marks, a small, dark bundle lay starkly exposed beneath the weak, silver glow of the streetlight. He wasn’t used to seeing dead things, but this thing was very dead, even he could see that. Crushed sideways as if caught stretching into deeper sleep, he could feel the whole weight of the thing against his foot as he tried to ease it out of sight under the side of a parked car.
‘What are you doing?’
She was watching him in the wing mirror as she reversed, his door still open. It's nothing, he wanted to tell her, just a hunk of ripped tyre, happens all the time round here, people use the place like a racetrack. But she knew very well what it was.
‘It's a cat’, was what he told her. She said nothing.
This was silent interrogation and he hadn't given her what she wanted, anything like what she wanted. He knew he had to go through the business of a full inspection: the bared teeth, the plumped belly. Yes, it was a tabby, just like Paddy. Exactly like Paddy, a little smaller maybe, a little younger. Yes, maybe like Paddy’s little brother. Yes, it had a collar: a medallion, flashing and blurring under its chin as it resisted his fingering. Of course, it had everything: name (Rocky - what was this, some sort of Macho Latino of the feline world?) address, even a telephone number for any cool bitch who got lucky (she was out beside him now with her phone torch, squatting over the body on the icy tarmac). This was a cat with a home all right. But it was a dead cat now. It looked like a very dead cat, with a very sick look on its face. This is it, he thought, we've killed Rocky on his own manor.
‘We've got to give it back’ she said, as though she'd actually been considering taking it home (Mace loved the 'We').
‘What? Are you serious?’ he said, watching her gently, lovingly scoop the thing up, its heavy head drooping over her elbow. Oh fuck, he thought. Where’s that mad cyclist? It was her fault, her problem. She should be here to deal with it. She should be taking some responsibility.
Jo, however, had already left him and the car in the middle of the deserted street. He felt the hard, cold edge of the open door but instead of climbing in and driving away (out of there, right now, before it was too late). He slammed it shut, put the keys in his pocket and looked around helplessly for Jo, already backing her way in through the gate of one of the terraced houses..
The curtained bay window, like several in the street, glowed with a warm internal stillness of festive greens and reds but in the silence of the pause after Jo, struggling with the dead body, finally reached the bell with its two note descending chime, it seemed (or Mace hoped) no one was home. However, just as Jo took a step back a curtain lifted in the window and a face appeared, a small face, a child's face framed by its border of artificial snow as roughly sprayed as a pre-school project.
A woman with a very big face opened the door. Mace thought woman rather than girl although she looked not much older than Jo. When she saw the bundle limply draped across Jo’s level arms like a religious offering, her mouth made the same O shape as her eyes. She covered it quickly with a big soprano hand while her big soprano body made an excellent job of blocking the doorway; her hips just failing to prevent a little girl's head determinedly squeezing through. Je-sus, thought Mace, there are just too many kids in this world.
Inside it was suddenly Christmas. A face-tingling aura of warm air sucked them into a daze of domestic bliss; a low-lit grotto hung with twists of tinsel and chains of luminous miniature lanterns wreathing the walls, mirrors, and, by the window, the stilled chaos of the tree. The place was a furniture showroom offering the exact simulation of a festive family home (poor but honest, simple but proud). Womb-like, thought Mace; of course, why wouldn’t it be? Yes, this was most definitely a loving home for little Rocky; with an obligatory loving family, more of whom were appearing with every embarrassed twist and turn, the walls closing in with each startled cry from each new arrival, repeating his name as if they couldn't quite believe it either: ‘Rocky?’, ‘Rocky?’ It was a debate in a Stallone convention where no one remembered the dynamic narrative structure of First Blood. Come on, Mace thought, what did you expect? If you'd given him some other name he might still be alive and curled up on the sofa. Where cats were supposed to be. What was he doing out there, his little muscles braced against a speeding hunk of angry sports car, if not trying to live up to his macho image? Big Dad, raising his soft weight from his favourite armchair, was no obvious boxing fan, but someone here was responsible for that handle.
When the smallest child appeared from the hall, peeling herself slowly from the diminutive silhouette in the doorway, the ragged chorus came to an abrupt halt.
Of course the child was hand-picked too. Waist high and dry-eyed, elbowing gently free of Big Mum’s helplessly protective arms, she stood centre stage, directly in front of Jo as if in awe, her mouth opening in quizzical slow-motion while the audience held its breath for the soundtrack to kick in. Mace recognised her as the face in the window. About eight or nine, a bob of red hair and the tough little tomboy look of an embryonic Feminist. Dressed in the standard outfit of an off-duty gymnast, she looked tough, but not too tough for luminous knee and elbow guards. He looked a long time at these, while her wide eyes, angled upward, flipped from Rocky to Jo and back again, calibrating this strange unimagined image or perhaps sighting her aim for the stillborn scream.
When she reached out to touch, or almost touch the head sagging more loosely than a soft toy over Jo’s left elbow, she suddenly looked very young - like a child, a brave child who had cuddled and nuzzled little Rocky as a kitten while his heart pumped delirium under her hand. Now she stared at him as though he was some unwanted present thrust upon her far too early. She was not ready for this. This was not what she’d had in mind, not right now, not ever. But it was a present she could not give back. Her elastic face contorted itself through a child’s gurning repertoire of pure pain until it came up with what looked like the right expression: betrayal.
It was some amateur magician’s sick trick, surely. It couldn’t be Rocky, could it? Not dead like that. What had happened to those nine lives? Where was that Tom and Jerry resilience? Reaching out across the barrier of Big Mum’s clasped arms, she grazed the fur of his now sagging paunch with the knuckles of her loose fist. She might have been pushing him away.
Big Mum drew her daughter back into her big arms, snuggling the bobbing head beneath the big breasts and searching for reassurance in Big Dad’s eyes, who, rooted on restless feet and trying to avoid hiding his own empty hands in his pockets, was a virtual doppelgänger in size and startled confusion; both had been rattled and were only slowly reclaiming balance and composure. What was the polite form in this scenario? With guests who deliver death to your doorstep? This couple (allies in a shared diet or some matchmaking gravitational pull) had come together to make this home and this child in it and this was their time; a time in which unwanted visitors, uninvited, unannounced, had exploded in on them like a nail bomb. Yet even in disaster there is humanity, the orphaned baby pulled from the rubble of the earthquake. They had sunk everything, their honest working lives, into this child and now she was giving them something in return by just standing there, quiet and brave. She was giving them everything. She looked like a sound investment.
Jo couldn’t take her eyes from the child who went on staring wide-eyed at Rocky as though still expecting him to squirm and elbow his way out of the arms of this whispering, hysterical woman.
Everyone else, however, was looking at Jo. And so was Mace. ‘I'm sorry…’ she was saying, her face working overtime to control a competing series of Tourette tics. "I'm sorry…’ she repeated, gripping mangled Rocky tighter and tighter as though afraid to give him up, as though she would take him away, have him repaired somehow and give him back later, fresh and new, bright and kittenish.
‘Don’t worry, love’ said someone, Big Mum in fact, with a certain empathy it seemed; but though her mouth struggled to form a sympathetic smile, Jo’s eyes drifted past her on a random journey around the room. The place was just too neat and the cat too much of a mess.
Finally, Big Dad, fully balanced at last, suddenly all bustle and business, failing to relieve her of the dead thing, led her out into the kitchen. From the end of the hall Mace watched him tenderly fan out a wide sheet of paper over the floor; Christmas wrapping paper, tube-fresh and curling up rebelliously as if it knew what was coming. Big Dad helped her spread Rocky across it like an awkwardly shaped present he’d struggle to wrap later, before hoisting himself upright with a sigh, slyly appreciating her legs (thought Mace) as her heels tapped out a hesitant pirouette on the tiled floor.
Back in the front room, Big Mum, still had the child trapped in the narrow space between mini bar and soundless TV (a forgotten cartoon splashing violent colour across the screen), their faces locked together side by side in a before-and-after while she muttered a soothing mantra or lullaby into the small, pink ear.
Breaking off from her crooning, she offered Mace a drink, as if this was how you attended to killers who brought your cat home dead. So they stood holding drinks and waiting for some conversation to happen. Rocky was two years old, she told him, he nodded and they were suddenly stuck with the story of the killing. There was only one subject between them. She didn't want to hear it and he didn't want to tell it, but there he was, trying to plead his innocence as though the family might be considering legal action. ‘Jo was driving’ he heard myself say at one point, looking back at the open door, where the kid must have slipped away; upstairs to release her sobs? Out into the street searching for the real Rocky?
As if she’d been listening from the hall, Jo now appeared, trailing Big Dad who was mumbling something ragged and consoling Mace didn't catch, some ‘Darn worry love, everyfink'll be awright.’ And, to the relief of Mace, stalling Big Mum’s casual interrogation: where did they live? How far? (What was she going to do, call the Police? Bin Paddy? Even the score?). Mace, however, was looking at the wide, dark stain across Jo's top, the damp cloth in Big Dad's hand, when a frustrated car horn caught everyone’s attention.
The whole operation moved itself out into the dark, cold road with a hurried walking chatter involving conflicting directions and instructions, aiding the killers to find their way home, or at least back the to the main road, Big Dad simultaneously keeping road rage to a simmer by redirecting angry headlights back up the narrow rat run to an unlit, almost invisible side road. Who, they wanted to know, would be taking the wheel? Immediately, Jo stopped to frisk herself with renewed hysteria. Seeing Mace produce the keys, she snatched them with a tight-lipped smile, simulating a sudden fit of suspicious composure to close down any further debate. Her face was stiff but she moved it mechanically from side to side, explaining how she ‘needed’ to drive, she ‘had’ to drive. She'd be all right. ‘Alright’ she said, echoing the returning Big Daddy’s ‘Awright, love?’, ‘Yes, yes, I’m alright now. I’m fine.’
Amazingly, the engine fired up first time, roaring like a 747. She eased back on the gas, paused as if to install night vision, then engaged gear. Rocky’s family, upright, watchful meerkats, faded into the dark of the side mirror as she cleared the road. At the first corner, however, she bumped the pavement and stalled. "You are alright?" asked Mace, distorting her mantra. She didn't even look at him. She raised her eyebrows and widened her lips until she was now almost smiling at last, amazed at herself, her head moving again, robotically from side to side. Maze had no idea whether this was yes or no.
She drove on steadily, easing through the maze of streets at walking pace with contemplative deliberation, learning how to drive all over again or perhaps considering, at every corner, turning back to Rocky’s house for a more detailed absolution. Slowly, however, the speed crept up until the hastily repacked bags were nudging his shoulder once more, pressing him to take control, do something.
As they swung out into the blaring horns and flashing lights of some arterial road, his skewed internal GPS had a vague idea where they were at last and they were not heading home. Jo, however, who now seemed to have lost her learner’s caution as well as any interest in the polite courtesy of the highway, looked as though she knew exactly where they were heading. She was going somewhere and she had to be there now, yesterday, last year. Mace now noticed how close they were to the centre of the road. It was hard not to notice this because she’d begun veering into the opposite lane and back again, her hands at ten to two lifting inches above the steering wheel, confirming a right-sided drift, and the shoddy workmanship in the garage. Shouting had no obvious effect, she had her foot down and just went on swinging in and out of any oncoming headlights. ‘You can't fucking kill us’ he heard himself say, but that was exactly what she could do, while he just sat there swearing in awe at the succession of blaring flares until in a rush he forced her off the wheel and got his foot in there on the brake and they spun in a manic gyro-skid before coming to a halt, the world outside contorted at a bewildering angle. They’d hit something bigger than Rocky this time.
Jo, however, hadn’t come to any halt; thwarted in climax, she was already pounding what she could reach of him in an awkward two-fisted frustration. Mace let her go on, offering no resistance, he was beyond all that, just kept his shoulder pressed to her, crushing her right up to the door until she couldn’t move. She was still for a while then, holding on to something unfinished, the way Paddy freezes after the first struggle has told you he doesn't want to be held, leaving you hugging a coiled spring of stalled violence.
Locked together, they remained a long time there in the dark (the interior lit by the occasional passing headlights), while he assessed the damage. Unable to see her face, it was a while before he became aware of the muffled sobs. When at last he released his hold, she remained still for a moment then bowed her head and really let go: loud, reckless sobbing, like a child. He put his arms around her again to draw her in, his thick blunt fingers kneading the muscles in her neck. It didn’t take such a great effort. What else could he do? They were stuck there and they couldn't drive away.
