‘Oh yes,’ he replied, a filthy grin spreading across his face.
‘One of those sort of dates, I see?’
‘Yep,’ he replied.
‘Well good for you.’
‘Good for both of us, it seems, TB. Good for both of us.’
In my life, I haven’t had much cause to be involved with the police. I haven’t been the victim of a crime I would consider reporting – someone once stole some change and a satnav out of my car when I didn’t properly shut the driver-side door – and I haven’t committed a crime that I could be arrested for. Yet, here I am walking through the automatic glass doors into a large reception area at the police station in Brighton. It is a huge beige and white building that from the outside looks like a long, low block of flats.
Steeling myself, forcing the shaking away, I walk up to the large, curved wooden counter that seems designed to put the average person at a disadvantage – you have to look up slightly to talk to the person behind it. And they look down on you to speak.
‘Hello,’ I say to the man behind the desk.
He is older than me, probably not far off retirement. His jowls are starting to show beneath the soft lines of his pale, aged face. His head is covered with grey-white hair and he is slightly overweight, but not so he’d need to do anything drastic. He leans on the desk and raises his white eyebrows at me rather than speak.
‘My husband was brought in earlier, erm, under arrest. I was wondering if I could see him?’
The policeman puts his head to one side and looks at me with what are kindly eyes; he seems to have the capacity to be gentle and probably calming, too.
‘What’s his name?’ he asks.
‘Scott Challey.’ A lump closes up my throat the second those words are out of my mouth. Scott Challey. Scott Challey. Scott Challey.
‘Ah, yes, Mr Challey. Brought in a couple of hours ago,’ he says without looking at his computer or the book I’d imagined they had for writing down who they’d carted off in front of their family. ‘Yes, he’s here.’
I didn’t ask that, I asked if I could see him, I think. ‘Can I see him?’
His expression becomes the equivalent of someone taking your hand before they impart bad news as he shakes his head slightly as he says, ‘I’m sorry, Madam, that won’t be possible, he’s still being questioned.’
‘What’s he being questioned for?’ I ask. ‘And how much longer will it take?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you either of those things,’ he replies.
‘Can’t or won’t?’ I reply, in frustration.
‘I’m sorry, Madam.’
I curl my hands into my palms again, to stop myself shaking and to stop myself wailing. I want to throw my head back and let out a huge, primal scream that empties my body and soul of all the emotions racing around them. I don’t understand why this is happening, why my life is unravelling, and I don’t understand why this man won’t help me.
‘Can I at least see the detective who arrested him?’ I ask.
‘I’d imagine she is questioning your husband right now.’
‘Please? I only want to talk to her. If I can’t talk to him then she’ll have to do. I just want to know from someone who’s seen him that he’s OK. If she tells me he’s all right, I can go and take care of my children and wait for him to come home. Please? Please?’ I don’t like to beg, but sometimes, that’s all you can do. Sometimes, the ends justify the means.
The Kindly Policeman’s kindly eyes study me for a few long moments. He can see the panic, fear and confusion on my face. Part of me still thinks this is not happening, that I am not standing in a police station asking a kindly policeman to let me speak to the detective that arrested my husband. I do not live the sort of life where my husband is arrested, so that’s why I am still struggling to believe this is happening.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ the Kindly Policeman says, ‘please take a seat.’ He nods towards the bank of seats near the door. I need to keep upright – I’ll seem weaker, less effective if I sit down. He nods again towards the seats and I know I have to do as he asks or he won’t try very hard at all to see what he can do. Not so kindly after all, then.
I go to the seats, settle myself between a man so thin and ravaged – probably by drugs and drink – I’m not sure how he walks without snapping, and a white-bearded man who is wide in girth because he is wearing everything he owns. Every item the white-bearded man wears is encrusted with black dirt, as are his hands, fingerless gloves and shabby, holey shoes. He’s giving off a smell combination of stale urine, sweat, dirt and beer that hits the back of my throat and then trickles down, turning my stomach every time I breathe in.
The policeman actually waits for me to sit before raising the handset of the phone beside him. He stares at me as he pushes three buttons, then continues to stare at me until the phone is answered. Then, he twists, while he talks quietly into the phone, presumably so I can’t read his lips and find out what he’s saying.
I feel sick.
Properly sick, not just a bit nauseous, I am seconds away from throwing up. It’s not only because of the man sitting next to me, it’s the slow, creeping dawn of reality: Scott has been arrested and the children have been traumatised by seeing that. I want to call Mirabelle and find out if the girls are OK, but I daren’t in case they wake up and I’m forced to go home before I can get some idea of what exactly is happening.
My eyes lock with the Kindly Policeman’s and his register pity. Pure, unadulterated pity. ‘I’ve seen this a million times before,’ his expression is saying. ‘Some poor deluded wife who has no idea what her husband is like, coming here, wanting to make sure he’s OK, when all along he is a prolific criminal with a double life; someone who deserves to be behind bars.’
I want to say in reply that he has no idea about me or my life, that I am not easily deluded and Scott is not a criminal. He may have come from criminal stock, but he is not one. But that look, that unnameable look I saw on Scott’s face, keeps barging its way into my mind. I lower my gaze because there is something going on that I don’t yet know about.
‘Mrs Challey?’ the policeman says.
My two companions turn their heads towards me in unison, then both jerk their heads towards the Kindly Policeman, telling me I am being called, and to go find out why.
‘You’ll be all right, girl,’ says the thin man.
‘Tell ’em nothing,’ says the many-layered man.
Rising from my seat, I walk on rubberised legs towards the desk.
‘Detective Sergeant Harvan said it’s highly unusual but she’ll be with you as soon as she can,’ he tells me.
‘Thank you,’ I reply.
‘Take a seat.’
I nod, and return to my crew. ‘Told you you’d be all right,’ the thin man says as I sit down again.
‘Good girl, you didn’t tell them anything did you?’ says the many-layered man.
Scott and I are going to laugh about this one day. We’re going to laugh and laugh and laugh.
Seventeen years ago
‘Aren’t you sick of just being friends?’ he asked me.
We were in my bedsit, a nicely-decorated large room with separate bathroom and loo, and a kitchen area – which had really classy wooden worktops – that I could screen off from the main sitting room/bedroom with a large, cream curtain. Living with my parents had got too much since it’d dawned on them that I definitely wasn’t going to university. Sarto was still living there, enjoying all the benefits while he went to medical school, and that was fine. Anyone could live there relatively unbothered if they were studying, but I was not doing that. I was a constant reminder of how they had failed – the one who found book stuff the easiest was the one who had turned her back on it. I loved working, I loved my job, and I’d been promoted several times in the last eighteen months but that all counted for nothing – as far as my parents were concerned – because I was without a degree.
Whenever Scott returned
to London from university in Essex, he would find me. We would spend our free time together, mainly hanging out in my bedsit, eating crisps and watching videos, then at the end of the holidays he would go back to university and we wouldn’t keep in touch. It wasn’t that kind of friendship.
‘How can I be sick of being friends?’ I replied. ‘You’re a wonderful friend.’
His dark eyes grew a bit wider, and his lips entwined themselves into a wry little smile. ‘I mean, don’t you fancy having sex with me? Once or maybe even a few times? But you knew that’s what I meant, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, I knew that.’
‘You just wanted me to say it out loud?’
‘Partly. I also wanted to give myself the chance to think about whether I wanted to have sex with you.’
‘And?’
‘I don’t think I do, actually.’
He was surprised and then immediately hurt, his face flushing red. ‘Not even a little bit?’ he asked, a little less confidently. ‘I get vibes off you sometimes … I was wrong?’
‘No, no,’ I rested my hand on his arm and a streak of desire shot through me, pooling in the space beneath my ribcage and between my legs. Scott did that to me even when I wasn’t touching him. ‘You’re not in any way wrong. I … I think I’m having too much fun seeing different people to want to, you know, have a boyfriend. Settle down. Especially with a guy who isn’t here most of the time.’
‘I wasn’t talking about that.’
‘Yes you were.’
His soft, pink lips twisted a little more. ‘Yes, I was. But not intentionally.’
I took my hand away, sat back on the beanbag and picked up my packet of crisps. ‘That’s not for me right now. Sorry.’
‘You don’t see yourself going out with a white man, let alone settling down with him, do you?’ Scott said.
I couldn’t help but sigh. He had to bring it up, didn’t he? He couldn’t leave it as it stood that I didn’t want to sleep with him. ‘I don’t think of you as a white person. You’re just Scott.’
‘But it’s true, isn’t it? If I was black, you’d think a bit more deeply about going out with me.’
‘And if I was white, you’d have asked me out properly instead of asking about sex, wouldn’t you?’ I snapped back. This was not a conversation I wanted to have, but he’d pushed it, he’d gone onto that precarious-looking spot of an old, rickety floor and had caused the whole thing to cave in. And because of that, we were tumbling through space with no idea where and when we were going to land, nor how we were going to be damaged by the fall. ‘Because in your head, if it doesn’t work out the way you want it to, you can always say it was just sex – nothing important, nothing to get upset about. You wouldn’t try to bed a white girl in the way you’ve tried to bed me so please don’t try to turn this on me.’
He pressed his lips even tighter together, his gaze holding mine. I challenged him in return to deny it, to say that wasn’t the case.
I circled my finger around the room, encompassing us in the invisible shape that I was drawing. ‘This whole thing, our friendship, our spending time together here, it’s all because you’re not comfortable with being seen with me. I’d even go as far as to say you’re ashamed of being seen with me.’
‘No!’ he protested. ‘That’s not true at all. It’s got nothing to with being ashamed of being seen with you.’
‘Then what is it?’ I replied. ‘Because it’s something to do with me being black. I’d say it’s to do with you being white, but you don’t see that as an issue, so I’m guessing you see me as the “problem”.’
‘There is no problem. I … I just find it hard, how we’re treated when we’re together. All my life, I’ve either had people be afraid of me because of my family, or treat me like anybody else because no one in Essex really knows what the Challeys are all about. But when I’m with you … I’ve never been treated with such rudeness and disregard as I am when I’m around you. The way people ignore you, or say things right to your face. It makes me so angry. And I don’t like to be angry. I find it hard to control myself when I’m angry.’
‘Fair enough,’ I replied.
‘So, no, it’s not you. It’s everyone else.’
‘OK.’
‘I’d be proud to be your boyfriend. If you’d have me.’
His skin was smooth, warm, silky almost as I stroked my thumb across his cheekbone. Desire thunderbolted through me again. ‘Not right now, eh?’ I said, the gentlest way I could think of letting him down. He wasn’t being completely honest with me. What he said might have been partially the truth, but it wasn’t all of it and I wasn’t getting involved with a man who wouldn’t be one hundred per cent honest with me, no matter how unpalatable that truth was. That path was the one taken by women who wanted to have their hearts broken and their minds messed with. I wanted neither for myself. ‘There are loads of women out there who are desperate to be with you, let’s carry on having fun as friends and leave it at that for now, eh?’
Scott’s brown eyes lowered themselves from my gaze and then he shifted in his seat to face and watch the television. ‘OK. Sure. Fine,’ he mumbled.
I have lived and waited a lifetime in the two hours I’ve been here. All the while avoiding my phone. It is burning an accusatory hole in my bag. I should have called Mirabelle by now. I texted her when I got out of the taxi to say where I was, then I texted her half an hour later to ask if the girls were still asleep, and she replied ‘yes’. Now it is over an hour later and I don’t know what it is going on either here or there.
I should not be here. I know that. I should be at home, but I can’t go home until I know he is OK. As long as they stay asleep, they’ll be OK. I so want to sleep. I so want to curl up and sleep and know this is not happening in my life.
Sixteen years ago
‘What are you doing with that?’ he said to Scott. His sneer smeared his words, curled up his lip and caused his eyes to snake nastily over me.
Scott and I were leaning against a wall, waiting for a bus into Wimbledon. I seemed to do nothing but wait for buses in my life outside of work, and when Scott was back from college that didn’t change.
‘What did you say?’ Scott asked conversationally, the barest hint of an edge to his voice.
His brother repeated his scrutiny, the disgust of his gaze sliming over me once again. I didn’t glance away, as he expected. I wasn’t an idiot so I didn’t glare at him or narrow my eyes at him – didn’t want to aggravate him further – but I wasn’t going to let him intimidate me. ‘What. Are. You. Doing. With. That.’ he said again.
Scott glared at his brother, a fox-faced man who wore the ravages of his life on his face: he’d been glassed or slashed on more than one occasion and as a result his left cheekbone was a patchwork of badly put together stitches, while the bottom of the right side of his jaw held a puckering of scarred skin. His right eyebrow was dissected in three places.
Scott leaned over to me, looked into my eyes for a moment too brief for me to communicate anything, and he covered my lips with his. His kiss went on a fraction too long, his lips were a bit too insistent and firm against mine, for him to be just making a point to the man in front of us.
‘You mean my girlfriend?’ Scott replied as he straightened up, staring down his older sibling.
The sneer on his brother’s face deepened, but he’d stopped staring at me, he was focusing on Scott. ‘What’s the matter, can’t get one of your own kind to suck your cock so you have to go slumming it?’ His brother was being quite restrained, I suspected, because there were people – also known as witnesses – at the bus stop. He wouldn’t think we were worth going back to prison for.
‘At least my own kind are humans,’ Scott replied. ‘Out of interest, which species of animal are you getting your kicks from nowadays?’
His brother’s entire body became a rigid mass of anger, his face filling with puce-red rage. ‘Say that again,’ he snarled.
‘Why, too clever for
you?’
‘You’re not too big for me to put you down, boy, don’t forget that.’
‘Yeah, funny how you stopped doing that the second I got big enough to hit back,’ Scott replied. His voice, which had been smoothed and shaped by his time in university, had taken a step back into his youth, to the part of London where we’d grown up.
‘Don’t push me, boy,’ his brother growled.
‘Who’s pushing?’
‘I see you with that again, you’re going to wish you’d never been born,’ his brother said. As punctuation to his threat, he snorted then spat at our feet.
‘Scared, that’s me,’ Scott replied.
‘You’ve been warned, boy. Just watch yourself.’ That last sentence was aimed at both of us before he marched away.
I finally understood what it was about Scott. I reached out and took his hand in mine. I finally understood that it wasn’t everyone else that made him so cautious about going out with me, it was his family and what they might do to me.
As soon as my flat door shut behind us, the world – his family – firmly on the other side, we reached for each other; moving at exactly the same time, our lips meeting at exactly the centre of the space between us. Our mouths kissed slowly as we undressed each other; nothing rushed or forced, just fluid, and simple; uncluttered by talk and plans and thoughts of what next.
In the bed, we gently groaned as we became one – we clung to each other, afraid to let each other go; afraid to let anything, even air, come between us and break, for even a second, our connection. We whispered into each other’s skin; we moaned each other’s names, turning them into epitaphs of pleasure; we moved our bodies together, trying to stay as one.
‘I really didn’t want that to end,’ Scott said to me afterwards, his hand lazily stroking my stomach while his fingers intermittently circled my belly button.
‘Hmmm,’ I heard myself reply, my hand slowly tracing a path back and forth across the hair-covered line of his inner left thigh.
‘It’s OK, isn’t it, that I’ve fallen in love with you?’ he asked.
‘Hmmmm,’ I replied, dreamily, ignoring the unease that flurried mutely but resolutely at the pit of my stomach. Scott immediately turned his head towards me, leaving a deep groove in the under-stuffed pillow he rested on.