Page 40 of The Trouble With Love

‘They’re saying there’ll be trees down and drifts up to the roofs and no one will be able to get out of their houses.’

‘They always say that. Every winter. And what happens? Two branches come down, we get three inches of snow and the trains don’t come north of Doncaster. Every year, Megan.’ I patted Rufus’s long back. He wagged his tail and nearly knocked me off the sofa. ‘Have you found his owner yet?’ With a slow yawn and a stretch that elongated him so far that he was almost next door, Rufus got up and went over to Megan. He laid his head in her lap and looked at me as though I’d suggested she have him put down.

‘I’ve . . . asked around.’ Meg plonked a kiss on the hairy nose and Rufus gave me smug eyes. ‘But I was thinking, he was soooo thin when I brought him in, and he had fleas and everything — whoever owns him can’t have looked after him.’

‘You’re going to keep him, aren’t you?’ I looked around at the tiny flat. ‘Perhaps you could train him as a carpet. Or just use his hair.’ I wiped my hand on my trousers again. Rufus wasn’t only slightly sticky he was positively adhesive.

‘I might look for a place in York so I can get home at lunchtimes and walk him, a basement flat, so we’d have access to a garden or a yard or something. It’s great you know, Holl, going out with Rufus. Everyone stops to chat. They all ask what breed he is, which is a bit awkward so I think I might make one up, but I’ve been for a drink with two guys so far who got talking to me while we were out with our dogs. Admittedly, Rufus tried to eat one and screw the other one, but he’s so good natured nobody really minds.’

‘Rufus tried to screw a guy?’

Megan giggled. ‘His dog, silly.’ She stood up and headed for the kitchen. With a sigh, Rufus followed her as though he was attached by string. ‘Anyway, I’m going to go to bed, snuggle down with some DVDs and let the storm blow itself out.’ She came back in with a packet of biscuits and sat down again.

‘Meg, those guys on the hill today. They weren’t playing games, you know.’

She gave me a cautious look. ‘I know. But going to the police . . . like Vivienne said, they’d be all over us for what we were doing up there.’

‘We could, you know, lie.’

Rufus, sensing her wandering attention, came back and rested his gigantic head in her lap, conveniently close to the biscuits. He dribbled, in an attention-seeking way. ‘But what could we say?’

‘We could go and get the candles for a start. Scrape up the blood, so there’s nothing to find. Then, I dunno, just say we were out for a walk. Walking Rufus, or something. And these guys attacked us in a Land Rover. Without any signs that we’d been doing magic, it’s the men’s word against ours, and we weren’t the ones going armed.’

‘Weeelllll,’ Megan cast a dubious look at the window. The sky was darkening rapidly. ‘I suppose we could. But not tonight, not with the forecast.’

‘No, not tonight. But maybe tomorrow, or the next day. Get up there, clear up any sign of spells, then ring the police, tell them we were so shocked it took a couple of days to get round to reporting it.’

‘Maybe.’ Whilst Megan was busy eyeballing the sky, Rufus stuck his head in the packet and gobbled half a dozen biscuits, one eye on me to see if I was going to stop him. When I didn’t, he grabbed the packet in his jaws and hurtled off into Megan’s bedroom, where we heard him leap onto the bed, and then the crunchy rustling sound of the entire packet, plus wrapping, heading down the gullet of a big dog.

Megan didn’t even get up. ‘I’d better take him out. He always . . . well, after he’s eaten he gets quite . . . and I’ve already changed the bed once.’ She pulled her cute, furry coat off the back of the sofa. She looked like Fozzie Bear in it, and the big hat with earflaps added to the fluffy-bunnikins appeal. No wonder men got talking to her when she was out with Rufus; she would look like a child being dragged away by a man-eating wolf.

‘Right. I’m off . . . home,’ I said slowly, waiting for her to invite me to come along. But she didn’t.

‘Okay. Well, we’re off to Brambling Fields. There’s a lovely guy there who has a greyhound, and he and Rufus enjoy chasing each other. He’s so nice, really adorable, all blond and sort of spiky. Great sense of humour.’

‘And you can’t say that about many greyhounds,’ I muttered.

Since I couldn’t put it off any longer, I went home.

Chapter Sixteen

You know I managed to kid myself that you were dead? That maybe you’d died giving birth and no one had told me, or that you’d been unable to live with what you’d done and ended it all?

Because I was there when Cerys was born. Wasn’t meant to be, of course, not much more than a kid myself, but when she started coming and it was too late to get Merion to the hospital . . . well, I stayed, held her hand while some woman we’d had to shout at from the window came in and sorted things out. And so I held Cerys, seconds old, face all screwed up as though this world was the nastiest thing she’d ever seen. Held her, covered in blood and mucus, the colour just coming to her limbs, watched her take her first real breaths and make her first real noise. I held her and I cried.

Because I saw what it cost Merion to give birth. How it hurt. How she had to work and pant and push that baby out of her body; the pain and the blood and, oh yes, the swearing. And despite all that pain, her first thoughts, her first words were for her baby. ‘Hello, love’ she said. ‘Hello, my little girl’.

All that suffering, and she could love immediately. She was consumed with it, wanting to hold Cerys, whispering to her, words even I wasn’t allowed to be part of. Mother and child, together. And I was nowhere. So, afterwards, while Merion got cleaned up and this lady made her a cup of tea, I stood and I held my daughter as she squirmed and yelled in my arms, treating me like no more than some weird bloke who’d wandered in to her life; feeling gravity for the first time. Wanting her mother, wanting the person who’d carried her for nine months, wanting the familiar smell and the comfort. Wanting what I’d wanted for sixteen years.

Hadn’t known I wanted it until I was ten. Had my parents then, not birth parents but that hadn’t mattered, they’d been all I knew, all I loved. And then — they were gone, you were gone — they hadn’t wanted to go but you had. You’d left me on purpose. And there was Cerys, crying for her mother, and Merion, who would hardly let go of her long enough to get washed . . . and me. Whose mother hadn’t even held him long enough to leave an impression.

And now I know that you didn’t forget. I have to rethink what I thought about you all these years — you loved me. Does that make it better or worse? Did you think of me with that kind of half-pleasurable pain that I get when I think of some of the women over the years? Had to leave them, no other way, but the sense of freedom made it worthwhile, that terrific, buoying sense of not having to consider another human being’s feelings any more. Of being my own person. Did you enjoy it, the way I did? That self-flagellation that gives you the shudder, remembering what you did, hoping and wishing until it’s real in your head, that it all turned out well. For the best.

And then you come shouldering your way back in, trying to hand me a guilt I never wanted.

Suddenly, sex isn’t enough, it won’t blot it out any more. Can’t use heat and friction to drive you away as though you’re some kind of evil spirit to be kept at bay with fire and light. And when sex isn’t enough — what else is there? What steps into the breach? I need something I don’t understand, something I’m not sure I can recognise, something that will soak up all this confusion and anger and turn it to the good. Another hand to hold.

Someone. Her.

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