Final Demand (27 page)

What was he going to do now? The expected scene – remorse, tears – had failed to materialize. She was too tough for him.
She'll always be one step ahead, will Nat. Know why? Because she looks after number one.

He picked up a towel from the floor. It was damp; Natalie wasn't the most diligent hostess. Though it was dark green, there were pale patches on it: peroxide. He recognized the signs from a few years earlier, when Sheila had briefly and disastrously dyed her hair blonde. ‘I look like Barbara Windsor on a bad day,' she had said.

What was she doing now? Maybe she had set up a hairdressing salon in Hebden Bridge. Twenty-eight years of marriage and she had submerged too, back into the unknown. When they had first met they couldn't keep their hands off each
other. He had recorded compilation tapes for her, three of them, they had taken weeks – stopping and starting the numbers, timing them and re-recording the ones that overran. A labour of love.

David dressed and went back into the living room. Natalie turned down the sound on the TV and pointed to a plate.

‘You like taramasalata?' She had spread it on crackers.

David took a bite but the cracker disintegrated, drily, and clogged his throat. Natalie uncorked the second bottle of wine and passed him a glass.

‘I know who we can blame,' she said. ‘The bastard who broke into my car. That's when I got the idea, when I saw a cheque for the cost of an alarm. Funny, isn't it, how one idea leads to another. Let's say the whole thing's his fault.' She laughed briefly. ‘Turned out he committed a bigger crime than he thought.'

There was a silence. David swallowed a mouthful of wine. Finally he asked: ‘Want to know what it's like?'

‘What what's like?'

‘She'd be going clubbing, like you do. She'd be washing her hair and meeting people and laughing.'

‘I don't go clubbing, not any more.' Natalie put down her half-eaten cracker. ‘Shall I tell you something? I'm in this great big city and I don't know anybody. I stay here in this room and watch TV.'

‘To tell the truth, she didn't go out much.'

‘I don't dare talk to anybody in case they find out who I am,' she said. ‘It's like I'm in prison already.'

‘I wanted her to go out and have a good time. Trouble was, she'd put on weight, she didn't look like you.'

‘Think that makes a difference?'

‘She used to be slim and quite pretty really. I was so proud of her – I used to be a good photographer, I used to take her photo—'

‘Tell me about it. I knew this photographer once, said he'd get me into modelling—'

‘But I stopped. When she was a teenager I stopped because . . . I don't know . . .'

‘Last I heard, he was doing nine years.'

‘I
do
know,' said David. ‘I stopped and now I've got nothing to remember her by.'

‘At least she
had
a father,' said Natalie. ‘She had you.'

‘But I never told her the important things.' Suddenly the words poured out. ‘I just shouted at her about her room and all the things that irritated me and really it was because I loved her and I couldn't bear her not to make the best of herself.'

‘She had
you
.' Natalie glared at him. ‘Aren't you listening? My dad couldn't be arsed, he just buggered off, and know what my mum's like? I bet your wife's nice.'

‘My wife's left me.'

‘She used to leave me alone all night when I was six—'

‘She left me because I wouldn't talk to her.'

‘I used to lie in bed and think she must've died and then who would take care of me? And then I'd hear the door slam and her laughing and some bloke laughing, both of them pissed, and she didn't even come in and see if I was all right.' Natalie had finished her cigarettes. She took one from his packet. ‘I saw things no child should see. I saw things and I heard things. And we moved from place to place so I didn't have any friends, and sometimes the blokes would come and live with us and once, one of them . . .' She poured more wine into their glasses; it spilt on to the table. ‘Maybe you should blame her, for making me what I was. But then she'd had a tough time when she was little, so maybe you should blame them,
her
parents – oh I give up.' She pushed back the hair from her face.

‘But you're alive,' David said.

It was chilly. The central heating must have switched itself off. Natalie sat, hunched in her sweater, and stared at the floor.

‘When she left,' said David, ‘I just said
Got your keys?
I didn't even say goodbye.'

She looked up. ‘Don't blame yourself.'

The table had burn-marks along the edge, from some past
tenant's cigarettes. He said: ‘After it happened, I used to drive round, in the night. I used to drive along the streets she must have walked on her way home. I wanted to be near where she was. I tried to make it all all right, that she wasn't frightened, that she was happy because she'd enjoyed herself at the party . . .'

‘She probably had.'

‘Some nights I'd park the car where she was found—'

‘Where
was
she found?' Natalie looked at him eagerly. After all, this was a murder story, like in the papers. ‘I don't remember where it was.'

‘Whitworth Street.'

‘Where's that?'

‘Just near the station. Piccadilly Station. There's a patch of waste ground there.' He stopped. There was a slope, behind a hoarding saying FOR SALE: DEVELOPMENT LAND. People tipped rubbish down it. There was a row of old buildings: Follies Disco, Yellow Cabs, a health club. A few feet away, traffic thundered past. He said: ‘Some people had put flowers there, bunches of them with cards.'

‘Did you?'

He shook his head. ‘I sat there and willed myself to feel something but I couldn't connect it to her . . . that place.' The slope was steep; at the bottom lay a broken pushchair and a filing cabinet. ‘They had taken her away by then. I couldn't believe she had been there. People coming and going at the station, everything going on around her as if nothing had happened. It didn't hit me at the right moment, see. It happened just when I wasn't prepared for it.' He paused. ‘I like to be prepared.'

They drank in silence for a while.

He said: ‘I wasn't prepared for the pain. The physical pain of it.'

Natalie asked: ‘Why didn't you talk to your wife? Why are you here, for Christ's sake? You don't even know me.'

Gazing down at his feet, he noticed how scuffed his shoes were. It was all that walking. He used to take care of his clothes,
he used to keep himself in trim. He thought of the landlord in the pub across the road; how he had stood rigidly in his smart jacket, with his face like a skull. ‘I keep thinking of all the things she's missed, since then, and some of them I'm glad about.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I'm glad about them, for her sake. Like that shooting in that American school. I think – at least she's been spared that. It came and went without her worrying about it – if she
would
have worried about it, and then I realize I didn't know her well enough to know if she would've been that upset.' He found he was crying. It was such an unfamiliar sensation that it took him by surprise. ‘I never got to know her, see, once she'd grown up. Somehow there wasn't the time.' He looked up. ‘Can you put on the bloody heating?'

Natalie got up and went into the hall. He watched her fiddling with the thermostat.

‘I'm glad she missed it,' he said, ‘and all the stuff about the dying planet, things like that, because now I don't have to worry about it either, things like surveillance cameras everywhere and old dears being mugged. I mean, what sort of world is it? What's the point of it all? But I don't have to worry about it for her, that she's got to grow up and find that out.'

Natalie came back into the room and sat, splay-legged, at his feet.

David said: ‘She was alone. I wasn't there to help her.'

Natalie's eyes filled with tears. She took his hand.

‘I'm so sorry,' she said.

He pulled her head to his chest. It was a clumsy gesture; she had to shift forward and he felt he was hurting her neck. But she was all he had.

‘She wasn't even robbed,' he said. ‘There was still eight pounds in her wallet. The minicab fare.'

Outside, a car alarm started wailing.

‘I haven't told anybody this,' he said.

She muttered into his jacket: ‘What can I do?'

‘Do what I came here for.'

Her head jerked back. She stared up at him, her freckles vivid against her white skin. ‘What did you come here for?'

‘Come back with me.'

‘What?'

‘Come back to Leeds and give yourself up. Nothing will get my daughter back but – don't you see? Justice will be done.'

‘Come back with you?' Her mouth hung open.

He laughed a thin laugh. ‘Call it my final demand. Otherwise, nothing makes any sense.' She had shifted away from him; they both found it embarrassing, clasped together like that. ‘We've got nothing to lose, either of us. Please, Natalie.'

There was a faint gurgling sound. It was the water in the radiator, heating up.

‘They'll find you sooner or later,' he said.

‘I know,' she replied.

‘It's only a matter of time.'

She sighed, and wiped her nose on her sleeve. ‘It hasn't been so much fun, this time around.'

‘Do this for me,' he said urgently. ‘For Chloe. Please!'

She got to her feet gracefully, in one movement, like a ballet dancer. He thought of his daughter's fat thighs.
She waddles.
Did he say it aloud, to Sheila?

‘All right,' said Natalie. ‘Give me five minutes. I'll go and pack.' She went into the bedroom and closed the door.

He sat there, on the hard dining chair. She had agreed! For a moment he could hardly believe it.

There was still some wine left, in the second bottle, but he thought: I've got to drive. Even in his state, he thought that.

He spoke aloud to the closed bedroom door: ‘It was me, really, who was to blame.'

There, he had said it.

His back ached. Sitting on the hard chair, he felt that he was sitting in judgement. But who was he to judge? That was why he had been unable to speak to Sheila. On the long drive north, through the night, he would tell Natalie this. He was as guilty
as she; they were in it together. Now the words had been loosed there was a flood of them, they would gush out, all the things he would tell this girl who until tonight had been unknown to him.

He would tell her about his youth, those heady years when anything had been possible. How he'd had a talent, a true talent like his daughter did, but that life had extinguished it. How all his hopes had been pinned on his daughter, to do what he had failed to do and to redeem him.

He felt sanity returning, warmth filling him like the heat in the radiator. He would go back and deliver Natalie up to the police. He would give up smoking; he would go on the wagon and sort out the rest of his life. A small shift would restore some balance to the world; some kind of justice would be achieved.

He looked at his watch; it was three in the morning. What a long, strange night it had been . . . It seemed to have lasted weeks. Peace flooded through him. With surprise, he realized that his rage was gone. He had lived with it so long that it took him a moment to identify the sensation. It was like the silence when you discover that, some time ago, the rain has stopped. The stillness and then the first, tentative birdsong, ringing through the air.

He gazed at the bedroom door. There were pricks in the paintwork. Some past occupant had pinned up pictures, like Chloe used to do: a party polaroid, a photo of a baby tiger. Behind the door his surrogate daughter was packing. Such was his gratitude to her, now that she had surrendered, that he did indeed think of Natalie warmly, like an alternative child – prettier and more adventurous than Chloe had ever been. The sort of girl he had tried to bully Chloe into becoming. Who knows? They might even stay friends, he might even visit her if she went to prison.

Later he realized how odd it was, to think this way – proof, if proof were needed, that he hadn't yet regained his sanity. But that was how he felt. He was drunk, after all.

Half an hour had passed. David got up and tapped on the door.

‘Natalie? We should get moving.'

There was no reply.

Perhaps she was having second thoughts. She was sitting on the bed, her face grim.
Push off and leave me alone.

He tapped again. Silence.

Finally he opened the door and went in.

Natalie lay on the bed, unconscious. Beside her, on the floor, was an empty bottle of pills.

David stood there, frozen.

‘Natalie!'

He lunged towards the bed and shook her.

‘Natalie, wake up!'

She was so frail. He could feel her thin shoulder blades beneath her sweater. Gripping her in both hands, he lowered his face to hers. She was still alive; he could feel her breath, soft against his lips. He cupped his hand under her breast; her heart was beating.

‘Natalie, don't do this.' A stupid thing to say, but still.

There was no phone beside the bed. David got to his feet and stumbled into the living room. On the shelf was a volume of the Yellow Pages but he could see no phone there either.

A mobile. She must have a mobile. He went back into the bedroom. Natalie looked smaller somehow, diminished already. Her blonde hair, spread out on the pillow, showed its dark roots. Transfixed, he stood there. He could almost see the life in her ebbing away.

She was still breathing. He could see the mauve mohair of her chest gently rising and falling. ‘Please don't die,' he said, his voice oddly conversational. ‘I'm going to call for help. You've got a mobile, haven't you? Everyone's got a mobile. Chloe's got one though she's always losing it.'