In the Dark Read Free

always, her younger sister, and hard to argue with.
    â€˜He’ll be fine when the baby comes.’
    â€˜How will you be?’
    The music was getting louder upstairs. She’d tell Paul to have a word when he got a chance. She moved through to the bedroom, sat down to try and do something with her hair. She thought men who described pregnant women as ‘radiant’ were a bit weird; same as people who thought they had the right to touch your belly whenever the hell they felt like it. She swallowed, sour all the way down, unable to remember the last time Paul had wanted to touch it.
    They were well past the ‘goodbye kiss on the doorstep’ stage, of course they were, but they were well past far too many other things. She wasn’t feeling a lot like sex admittedly, but she would have been well out of luck if she was. Early on she’d been gagging for it, like a lot of women a month or so in, if you believed the books, but Paul had lost interest fairly quickly. It wasn’t uncommon; she’d read that, too. Blokes feeling differently once the whole motherhood business came into it. Hard to look at your partner in the same way, to desire them, even before there’s a belly appearing.
    It was much more complicated, their relationship, but maybe there was some of that going on.
    â€˜Poor little bugger doesn’t want me poking him in the eye,’ Paul had said.
    Helen had scoffed, said, ‘I doubt you’d reach his eye,’ but neither of them had really felt like laughing much.
    She pushed her hair back, and lay down; trying to make herself feel better by remembering earlier times, when things weren’t quite as bad. It was a trick that had worked once or twice, but these days she was having trouble remembering how they’d been before. The three years they’d been together before things had gone wrong.
    Before the stupid rows and the fucking stupid affair.
    She could hardly blame him for it, for thinking that there were more important things than her. Than a place for them to live. The two of them and the baby that might not be his.
    She decided that she’d go and have a word about the music herself; the student in the flat above seemed nice enough. But she couldn’t rouse herself from the bed, thinking about Paul’s face.
    The looks.
    Angry, as though she had no idea at all how hurt he still felt. And vacant, like he wasn’t even there; sitting at the table a few feet away and staring at the back of the stupid cereal box, like he was reading about that missing plastic toy.
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As Paul Hopwood drove, he tried hard to think about work; singing along with the pap on Capital Gold and thinking about meetings and stroppy sergeants and anything at all except the mess he’d left behind.
    Toast and fucking politeness. Happy families . . .
    He turned right and waited for the sat-nav to tell him he’d made a mistake; for the woman with the posh voice to tell him he should turn around at the earliest possible opportunity.
    The ghost of a smile, thinking about a lad he knew at Clapham nick who’d suggested they should make these things with voices designed for men with ‘specialist interests’.
    â€˜It’d be brilliant, Paul. She says “turn left”, you ignore her, she starts getting a bit strict with you. “I said turn left, you naughty boy.” Sell like hot cakes, mate. Ex-public school boys and all that.’
    He turned up the radio, switched the wipers to intermittent.
    Happy families. Christ on a bike . . .
    Helen had been turning on that look for weeks now, the hurt one. Like she’d suffered enough and he should be man enough to forget what had happened, because she needed him. All well and good, but clearly he hadn’t been man enough where it had counted, had he?
    Mrs Plod, the copper’s tart.
    That look, like she didn’t recognise him any more. Then the tears, and her hands always slipping down to her