Border Crossing by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group UK
Published: 2008-11-20T23:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Tom had been living alone, except at weekends, for more than a year now. There was no reason why Lauren’s deciding to get a divorce should make the house seem larger, but it did. He came down next morning to a living room that had expanded to the size of St Pancras Station. Pieces of furniture stood with their backs to the wall, watching him. One false move out of you, mate, they seemed to say, and we’re off too.

He spent the morning trying, and failing, to work. Then he rang his mother, arranged to have supper with her, and over the meal told her the news, which came as no surprise, and left, just after ten o’clock, feeling… brutal. He’d cancelled the future.

When he got back, the house seemed to have become emptier. Ridiculous; he was used to coming home to an empty house. Walking round it – since there was clearly no point in going to bed – he discovered that some rooms were worse than others. The bedroom, surprisingly, was tolerable. He simply switched to sleeping on Lauren’s side. The kitchen was very bad. Even sitting in her chair, he was aware of the noise of his own eating, biting, chewing, swallowing, and he couldn’t stand it. Like feeding time at the zoo. After the first morning he ate breakfast standing up, or walking round the garden, and had supper upstairs on a tray.

The computer screen unnerved him. The winking cursor was both too demanding, and not demanding enough. It could be ignored, as a patient sitting in the chair beside his desk could never have been ignored. He began to search for things to do to take him out of the house. He arranged to see Bernard Greene, Danny’s old headmaster, and he made a list of interviews he needed to do with kids on the Youth Violence Project.

Ryan Price was the first name on the list. Making the appointment wasn’t easy, because Ryan’s mother wasn’t on the phone, but keeping it was worse. He couldn’t take a taxi because no taxi driver would go on to the estate. He couldn’t park outside the house because the car would be stolen or torched by the time he got back, and the bus dropped you off on a corner that had one of the highest rates of muggings in mainland Britain. In the end he drove to the nearest GP’s surgery, left the car in one of their secure parking spaces and walked the rest of the way.

He turned the corner into Belford Street, and saw a police car pulled up on the kerb outside Ryan’s house. Two policemen were getting out. The older one nudged his companion. ‘Hey up, here comes the silver streak.’ A reference to a time, two years earlier, when Tom had got done for speeding. The police never tired of the joke.

‘Which one are you after?’ the older one asked.

Tom shrugged and spread his hands.

‘Well, if it’s Robbie and Craig, you can’t have ‘em.

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