Alligator Playground Read online

  A future of living alone glowed like paradise, no longer listening to his sneers about her painting, which he had encouraged her to work at full time so as to take the pressure off himself, though he had always denied it. Tyres crunched gently into a layby, and she switched off the engine to lower her head to the wheel.

  The scene of going back brought hot tears that were cold when they hit her wrist. Nobody deserved leaving more than Tom, and the picture of him searching the aisles would be one to smile about while getting used to living without the pall of his closeness. Not that the vision would do anything for her self-esteem if he was still so much in her thoughts.

  She checked for money, passport and address book, fingers shaking through her satchel, the uncertainty another step towards strengthening of the will. He had given her a small photo in case she forgot to whom she was shackled and, pulling it from the wallet, her fingers couldn’t rip beyond four pieces. They skimmed satisfactorily out of the window, caught up by the wind, a large crow chasing in case they were food. Poor thing would choke.

  A surge of energy drove her on, short-cutting along lanes where speed, and she used one of his favourite clichés, was of the essence

  . No need to go into the wonderful house, the best she’d ever lived in. She set the Volvo by the barn, couldn’t say whether the phone was tinkling from the kitchen, or a bird family in the great elm was arguing about what to pack for the migration.

  In minutes she was out of the gate and up the track in her faithful Peugeot paid for by money from her paintings, wipers dealing with a flush of rain, no tears anymore, not even a thumping heart, only a childish lightness of spirit that set her singing. If he came towards her in a taxi, ‘I’d ram the bastard,’ she shouted, winding down the window to see the way clear.

  A cigarette tasted fine and was good for a meal. When he found the house empty he wouldn’t know which way she had gone, and even if guessing he would only sit with a bottle of booze waiting for her to come back. Nothing is forever, he had often said, but now it was. Hard to know why she hadn’t flitted months ago, but she had made up her mind in a dark mood when unable to put any life into one of her paintings, and had asked herself what was the point of being on earth and at the same time miserable. She’d never know, but could now ponder the matter without him distorting her reason.

  Take time, drive well, don’t bump the verge – she forked by a pub towards the main road, the punch-button radio playing ‘The Dead March From Saul’. Gloomy music and she soon knew why. The newsreader said that the death had occurred of, due to. My God! A loss to the literary world because. Electricity pylons snaffled the reception. Had he gone into a despairing spin on finding that Mummy had left him without a bucket and spade? Luck was fickle. He hadn’t had time.

  ‘The death has occurred of Mr Norman Bakewell, the eminent novelist, who collapsed last night at his club, and died in hospital this morning.’

  The titles of bestsellers were trotted out, and she pictured Tom, sombre and handsome in his black at the graveside, annoyed by the clayey soil on his shoes as he glanced around to see what writers he could poach into the place of slimy old Bakewell who, she now knew, had put a curse on them at Charlotte’s lunch party all those years ago.

  FIVE

  NEVER WITHOUT A credit card, Tom paid for his loaded trolleys and laughed at the idea of pushing them the whole way home. He parked them by the toilets, hoping they wouldn’t get looted while he went searching for Diana, and made a phone call to the house telling her to come and collect him or he would go on a berserker’s spin with a knife through her studio.

  He got her prim voice on the ansaphone, and gave it a good talking to in case she picked it up in the next few minutes. He could only assume that, seeing him once too often trying to get acquainted with a personable woman, she had thrown a spectacular nervous breakdown and gone home to sulk, or to put more splashes on her trashy therapeutic paintings. All the same, he was nagged with distrust at this explanation, thinking that maybe the tension of treating him like a normal human being at breakfast had brought on a heart attack by the bleach and soap shelves, and she’d been stretchered away in an ambulance. But when he looked around there was no sign of piss or vomit, and business seemed normal.

  The woman he’d chatted up laughed at his story of an au pair from Eastern Europe, whose morbid fit at seeing such masses of varied and marvellous goods had driven her from the supermarket. Once started, his tale spun on. In panic and despair she had driven off in the car he had taught her so patiently to drive. ‘I suppose she’ll turn up later, probably this evening when her suicidal misery has worn off. Meanwhile, she’s left me to get all these groceries home, so I’d better call a taxi.’

  Tina said she would give him a lift. It wasn’t far out of her way.

  ‘That’s wonderfully kind.’ He smiled at the thought of landing once more with his bum in butter, as Norman Bakewell put it in one of his books. ‘My name’s Tom.’

  If Diana was there to see him come home with his new friend it would serve her right, and certainly make him happy. It occurred to him that when he was married to a dark-haired woman his affairs were with blondes, and that when hitched to someone with fairish hair he went for lovely dark-haired women like Tina. ‘Are you sure, though?’

  ‘If I stow my lot in the boot, you can put yours on the back seats.’

  ‘What sort of a car do you have?’

  ‘It’s that BMW over there.’

  Life was good, just when you felt a tremor that it might not be. Diana could go to hell, playing a trick like that. Tina joked about his predicament on the way back to the house, especially after he admitted, angling for more advantage out of the situation: ‘It’s my wife, really, who left me in the lurch. We’ve been on about splitting for months, and this is the way she chose to do it.’

  ‘I suspected it,’ Tina said. ‘My husband does that sort of thing a bit better, though, and it suits us both. He’s an aeronautical engineer, and he’s away most of the time in Saudi Arabia. He fixes up planes, and writes off as many as he can so that they’ll go on buying more from us.’

  ‘Very patriotic,’ Tom said.

  She touched his wrist. ‘Isn’t it?’

  Unloading the stuff, after noting that the Peugeot had gone, he called Tina into the kitchen for a cup of coffee, jet-grinding the beans to give her the best. He kept up an amusing spate of talk as if to show that any wife who abandoned someone of his quality could only be a wayward spoiler.

  Saying goodbye, they clung to each other at the door like the positive ends of two magnets. The first kiss with a new woman was always the best ever. ‘Sure you can’t stay a while?’

  ‘I’d love to, but it’s not possible. Must get back and feed my two children. They’re home from boarding school this weekend.’

  ‘Pity.’

  Her brown eyes sparkled. ‘They go back on Monday.’

  ‘Can I have your phone number?’

  She wrote it on a bit of card from her wallet.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ he said.

  ‘Do.’

  Another kiss, as well as one blown from the car window. He danced around the kitchen in expectation, so randy after pulling the lubricious encounter out of the future that he called for Diana, and realised she wasn’t there.

  His spirit slumped further when the one o’clock news gave out that Norman Bakewell had been topped by the grim reaper. The way he lived should have set Tom waiting for it, but the evidence against Norman living forever – more or less – never had much weight. His death was also a bang to the system because, though sales of his books would be good for a while, they would drain out to zilch within a year, which made it the worst of news.

  He spread an island of cornflakes over the table and shaped a narrow bay on the south side while thinking of Tina: ‘She loves me, she loves me not; she loves me, she loves me not,’ then stopped because he didn’t know whether he meant Tina or Diana.

  At three o’clock he brushed un
eaten cornflakes onto the floor with his sleeve and, crunching over them, walked out and into each room, downstairs and up, over to the barn and storehouses, truffling for indications as to why she had bolted and where she had gone. The beams of the long two-roomed lounge were a bit low for a rope, but he was too spongy in the brain to be serious, and by the time his curiosity had been swamped with the truth he wouldn’t care to hang himself. In any case, hanging could be a slow business. The shotgun might be quicker, but that was strictly for the rabbits. There had never been a clearer case for giving Norman a bell and talking about the matter, but the crazy piss artist had kicked the bucket.

  If she had really gone – and maybe she had, not denying a flicker of relief at the thought – it was unforgivable that she hadn’t left him the consolation of a fiery anathema in red ink on the back of their marriage certificate. And yet, where could she go? Probably to that batty old aunt who lived in clotted cream and pasty land, and made shit-coloured pots. Maybe Diana expected him to go after her so as to give proof of his love. Fat chance of that, as well.

  He stretched his long legs from an armchair, troubled to realise, at long last, that in personal relationships his mind wasn’t subtle or wary enough to detect in advance the schemes being laid for his downfall, while those he wove himself were useless because they were only for his amusement and never led to action.

  The central heating was at full crack, but he shuddered in the chill gloom. He put on another sweater, hoping he wasn’t marked for the flu. The temperature seemed ten degrees lower with a single body in the house, but the thermometer read normal. He couldn’t understand why Diana’s absence made the house feel so different. How would he be able to work the washing machine, and figure out the time clock for the central heating system, not to mention the various burglar alarms?

  Sleep was getting the better of him, as it never had during the day. To stay awake he dialled Denise. Her ansaphone came on, and he had no real message to leave. Saturday afternoon wasn’t their time, and whose it was he couldn’t know. Where was she, anyway? Was the world suddenly without women? He should have been more forceful with Tina and got her to stay, or at least to come back in the evening.

  When he reached Denise on her mobile she sounded as if just back from a bout of tennis – or love.

  ‘Diana’s gone,’ he said.

  She laughed. ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Not to the bathroom, that’s for sure.’

  ‘To see a boyfriend, I should hope.’

  ‘It’s not funny.’

  ‘Oh well, if she comes to my place I’ll let you know. But thanks for telling me. She might try the same as one of your ex’s did to her.’

  ‘She’s not that sort, so relax.’

  ‘Even so, you’d better not show up at my flat.’

  ‘I know. I’ll hang on here, in case she comes back.’

  He didn’t like her way of avoiding trouble: ‘Yes, that’s best.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Not up your way, if that’s what you mean.’

  He hadn’t expected her to be any help, but why was it that the women he took up with, so compliant at first, soon became too hard to handle? He put the phone down and lay on his bed, the question putting him to sleep.

  Waking, something had shifted and he didn’t know what. His chin was smooth but he felt in need of a shave. There was too much on his tectonic plate, though nothing around him seemed solid or real. Having a wife run out on you was one thing, but to be left high and dry in the middle of a supermarket with two trolleys of provisions was so original an idea as to be unforgivable. Of all the ways he had mulled on to leave her, his well-dug imagination had never thought of that, and the sense of gall was destabilising. Devilishly planned and done, it showed she wouldn’t come back, which made it futile to chew on the miseries he would put her through when she did.

  All lights on, no curtains drawn, he set Sibelius’s ‘Finlandia’ to play full blast on the Bang & Olufsen, performed by a block-and-tackle band from a bleak industrial ruin in the Black Country. Halfway through his second bottle of Bordeaux red, blue lights began revolving outside the window. Drink had never done that before. Closing his eyes and opening them didn’t get rid of the notion that someone had come for him from Mars, or even Jupiter. They had travelled all that way especially for him, an experience he could well do without.

  The hall also was lit by flashing space stations. Or were they navigation aids? The doorbell was so loud it almost killed the music. Back for reassurance in the kitchen, he pulled up the lid of the Aga to check that it was hot, but the signalling continued, as if someone had wedged a matchstick in the bell and run away.

  He remembered that every December he went into the local cop shop and put a tenner in the orphans’ box. Perhaps they had figured who he was through the two-way mirror, and noted the plate of his car as he drove away, and had come to say thank you. Or maybe a burglar was outlined on the roof and they wanted to save his collection of incunabula. Having unloaded a multiple-barrelled battering ram from the car, they now set to work on the main door.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’d be best if we came in, sir.’

  Unmannerly to make them stand in the drizzle, though the porch was dryish. On the other hand there were no neighbours to hear what they would take him away in irons for. He’d at least had the sense to get drunk enough not to worry about something like that.

  What a fullsized wicked thing to do, though. Was there no end to her vengeance? She had called at Reading and phoned a rent-a-cop firm, giving her credit card number (no, his, to rub in the salt) and told these two costumed berks to put him through this pathetic practical joke. They must have served their time at RADA because they were so good at it.

  He recalled a colleague at work being sent a policewoman. She had gone into his office with a clipboard as if to reprimand him for all the parking fines he’d flipped into the gutter, then started to get her kit off, a lovely full breasted young woman, who kissed him on the mouth and wished him a happy birthday, to Force Nine laughter from friends outside.

  ‘Quarrelled, did you?’ was the first question registered out of the confusion.

  Neither would sit, and Tom stood so as to be on the same level. Say as little as possible when the cops start talking to you. ‘We always do, there’s nothing unusual in that.’

  ‘Did you note the time when she left?’

  ‘I’ll need to call my lawyer.’

  ‘I’m sorry to say it’s nothing like that.’

  She had sprung something big on him here, by forcing him to tell the whole sorry yarn, the deadliest mantrap on the shelf, except it seemed she had driven into it herself. Or so they said. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this.’

  Killed by an old age pensioner. Well, he was sixty-five, the ancient fart. He was driving the wrong way down the M4, in a hurry to meet his Maker, and not too worried who he took with him, except that: ‘Oh, he’s not dead. Not a scratch. Got out and walked away. Ran down a bank when our car got close. God knows where he thought he was going.’

  The other laughed himself purple. ‘He walked away from two write-offs! Would you believe it?’

  ‘You’ll have to come and identify her, sir.’

  He didn’t want them to see his legs shaking, and sat down. ‘I can’t believe this. I’m not alive.’

  They performed this social service all day and every day, probably their only duty, with so many sudden calamities. A smile like mag-gots under the skin was close to their professional concern, which led him to wonder again whether they were dropouts from RADA, or old lags who’d been to acting classes given in jail by a super-annuated thespian. Why hadn’t she sent him a busty young policewoman instead? Well, she wouldn’t have done that, would she? The ginger-bearded copper gave him a poor sod look. ‘Do you think you’re going to want some counselling?’

  It had to be your birthday to get a policewoman. ‘Counselling? Certainly not.’

  Tom liked the edg
e of contempt in his voice at such a need. ‘Just thought I’d ask.’

  ‘Most do, these days,’ the other said sadly. ‘But I would keep off the bottle, sir. There’s lots to do.’

  A hangover had never gone so quickly, though the full drill of his willpower was called on to stop the shakes. Poor old Bakewell had missed this, just. He rubbed his face, but the picture of metal and gore remained, a way out he had never wanted or thought about. All his malice had been in the mind, and he had never considered this as a possible end to any of his marriages.

  The sun at the funeral was weak but welcome. People stood in groups, and you had to know which you belonged to in case you got nudged in with the coffin. Diana’s parents, who had always regarded him as wicked and unfeeling, stayed well clear. Only Jo Hesborn came to him. ‘Of all the people from the past, I loved her the most.’

  Bakewell would have struck that line out, but Tom felt like Blondin going on his high wire over Niagara Falls, and held Jo’s hot dry hand in his to steady himself. ‘I could say the same.’

  Her handkerchief was wet, tears falling through onto her leather three-quarter length coat. ‘She was marvellous. We had such good times together.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘I’ll never forget her. It’s too bad.’

  ‘How do you suppose I feel?’

  ‘I can imagine, believe you me.’

  He couldn’t think why he experienced such a rich fondness for this near forty-year-old lesbian by his side. No wine glass close for her to hurl at him, he would kiss her even if only to enrage the others. His lips at hers, staying too long for seemliness, but to which hers with suddenly more shape in them responded, sent a wave of the purest erotic feeling through him. He felt momentarily shamed and threatened, as if Diana had entered sufficiently for him to act in this way, but the emotion was erased by happiness when Jo held his hand again on their way to the car.

  After the wake, when everyone had gone but Jo, their farewell kisses turned into an embrace, passion increasing as mutual tears wetted both shirts. Words were ripped from him. ‘I love you, darling, I love you.’ Then he thought: but I don’t, I don’t. Then: I do, I do, so what the hell? Could be I’m doing something right for a change.