Jane sat back, took a large swig of wine. They sat in thoughtful silence until she spoke again.
“Sorry,” she said, “but you did ask. It’s me pet subject. Gets us goin’ every time.”
“Your home,” said Larkin, “you can say what you like.”
“Right,” she said, smiling. She put her glass down and leaned back in the chair, listening to the music, trying to regain some of her earlier peace. Suddenly she was sitting forward again, passionately animated. “You know what?”
“No. What?”
“You know what my dream is? My ambition?”
“Become Prime Minister?”
“Fuck off,” she replied with a laugh, “that’s not the way to get anythin’ done. No, what I’d love to do is start up a refuge. A place where kids who’ve run away from home – from difficult or abusive families, whatever – somewhere for them to come to and feel safe. Instead of bein’ on the streets, gettin’ picked up by pimps and pushers. An easy-goin’ kind of place where they could get help if they wanted it – counsellin’, maybe – but with no pressure. No hassle. Kids like that now go into council homes and get treated like criminals, when all they’ve done is run away from a parent
who was abusin’ them. I wanna give them somewhere they can feel sheltered, safe.” She sat back in her chair again, her energy ignited by her project.
Larkin studied her, her black denim-clab legs tucked under her and her white T-shirt hanging loose. So much strength and determination in such a small person. He didn’t doubt she would get her refuge. He didn’t doubt she could do anything she set her mind to. Her no-bullshit attitude in fighting for what was necessary cast an interesting light on Larkin’s nocturnal shakedown. Not for the first time was he having doubts about that. He felt like a self-aggrandising, twisted fraud who had come up against the real thing. He admired the hell out of her – but he also knew it was more than admiration he felt.
“What you thinkin’?” Jane asked him.
“Oh,” he said, “miles away.” He quickly took another gulp of wine. “So,” he began hesitantly, “have you been involved with anyone since Alison was born?”
Jane smiled. “I thought we’d get round to that eventually. No. Not really. One or two. Nothin’ special.”
“Right.” Larkin nodded. He knew what he should do next – but it had been so long …
“I think I’ve got the same problem you’ve got,” she said suddenly, swinging her legs off the chair and coming to join Larkin on the floor.
“Which is?”
“Fear of gettin’ involved. I mean, I can understand it in your case, I know how badly it ended the last time. How fucked up by it you were.”
Larkin nodded, relieved at her understanding.
“I feel the same. But sometimes …”
“You just have to take a leap of faith?” finished Larkin.
“Exactly,” she said.
They brought their lips together, and kissed.
Larkin couldn’t sleep. He lay on the leather sofa, tossing and turning. Initially he had dozed, but some unexpected choral chanting of football anthems down below had forced him wide awake. He lay there, listening to the gangs roaming the estates, letting rip with occasional screams and howls, breaking bottles, overturning
dumpsters. He heard the approach of sirens and the jeers that greeted their arrival. And, to get away from it all, he replayed the events of earlier that evening.
Locked in an embrace that was becoming more frantic by the second, Larkin and Jane’s tongues were intertwined. They kissed fiercely, ferally; the pent-up need in both their bodies was released simultaneously. Their lips met, their teeth, biting and sucking, devouring. Their hands began to grab at each other’s clothes; Jane pulled Larkin’s robe off, he tore her T-shirt over her head. She undid her bra, he began to unfasten the buttons on her Levis. She arched her back, helping him to push them over her hips – and there they were, clasped together, completely naked.
Larkin pulled his mouth away from Jane’s and began to work on her neck; kissing at first, then nibbling, then biting. She responded, moaning in time to his lips and teeth.
He ran his hands over her body, felt her small, firm breasts, the nipples immediately hardening to his touch; down over her flat stomach, to the soft, dark hair between her legs. He pushed a finger onto her clitoris and she groaned, pushing her pelvis forward to meet it, grinding herself onto him.
She reached down and grasped his cock, pulling the skin right back, squeezing hard. He sighed at her touch and she placed her mouth on his shoulder, sucking the skin. With one hand on her clitoris, he moved his other hand between her legs. She quickly parted them and he made to enter her.
Before he could, however, she reached for her jeans, pulling away from him. She produced a condom, snapped open the packet with her teeth, and rolled the rubber onto Larkin. All the time she kept eye contact with him; she looked like a wild animal, drunk on lust. Larkin imagined he must look pretty similar.
The condom in place, she began to move her hand up and down the shaft of his penis, squeezing as she went. Larkin pushed himself forward, into her, and she raised her hips, meeting him, finding a rhythm and rocking – deeply and violently.
Sweat ran down Larkin’s body as Jane pulled him even closer, pushing him, matching him thrust for thrust. Suddenly her body stiffened beneath him and she flung her head back as orgasm coursed its way through her. He too could hold back no longer and
came inside her; the intensity almost caused him to black out.
As they came down from their shared high, they gazed at each other, wondering, barely recognising in themselves the lust-fuelled creatures of a few moments ago. Larkin rolled off to the side of Jane and she snuggled into his chest. He threw his arm round her, keeping her close.
Larkin was perfectly, post-coitally, relaxed. And, although he fought against it, he couldn’t help nodding off.
He was woken a short while later by Jane, gently trying to extricate herself from his embrace.
“Where you goin’?” he asked in a blurred voice.
She smiled. “I thought you were out for the night.”
“C’mere.”
Slowly she moved towards him. It was the first time he had really looked at her body. Small breasts, slim waist, rounded hips, shapely legs. She was beautiful. She lay down next to him again.
“I think we both needed that,” she said.
“Yeah – we did.”
“Stephen …”
“Yeah?”
She propped herself up on one elbow and looked at him, frowning slightly. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but …”
Here we go
, thought Larkin.
“Would you really mind sleeping on the sofa tonight?”
“Why?”
“Well, you might think I’m daft, but it’s ’cos of Alison. If she wakes up in the middle of the night and comes in to me, I don’t want her to be freaked out.”
“Sure. No problem.”
“You don’t mind? Really? It’s just that, I don’t care what people say, somethin’ like that can fuck your kid up for life.”
“And you want to protect her.”
“I do. I’d do anythin’ to keep her safe.”
Larkin smiled. “That’s fine.”
She kissed him on the lips. “Thank you for bein’ so understandin’.” She made to stand up; Larkin held on to her hand, tight.
“Do that thing again,” he said.
“What thing?”
“That kissing thing.”
She knelt back down and planted her lips on his. He put his arm around her, and the kiss became more impassioned. Eventually, Larkin pulled away.
“So,” he said, “you got any more condoms in those jeans of yours?”
They made love again. Slowly this time, more tenderly. They spent longer touching, exploring each other’s bodies, finding the little idiosyncratic things that turned each other on. As their inhibitions were cast off, their pleasure increased. Finally they lay on the floor, satiated, until Jane got up to go to bed.
She gave him some sheets and a pillow, kissed him goodnight and left him alone.
And there he’d lain until the roaming gang had disturbed his rest. He had really enjoyed today, he thought; it had been the most fun he’d had in ages.
He was just dropping off again when he was woken up by a drunk, straggling along the landing outside, shouting a song whose meaning was known only to the singer, and dragging a broken bottle along the outside wall.
Larkin turned over, shoved the pillow over his ears.
What a fucking awful place to live
, he thought, thankful he didn’t have to.
It was the call Larkin had been waiting for.
Eight thirty on a Monday morning and he hadn’t fully woken up yet. He was aware that Alison had left her own bed, gone into her mother’s, forced Jane to wake. The child had managed to cajole a story out of her bleary-eyed mother and for the next twenty minutes or so, Larkin had been treated to the truncated, Disneyfied version of Peter Pan, Jane reading, Alison keeping up a constant barrage of often unanswerable questions such as, “But why does Captain Hook hate Peter?” and “Why don’t The Lost Boys have mummies?” The two of them had then moved into the kitchen to have breakfast, walking on tiptoe so as not to wake him. Larkin didn’t let on that he wasn’t asleep – he was enjoying the warm doziness. He hadn’t been in anything approaching a family set-up for years; after the untimely demise of his own, he had avoided parent-child situations. But spending the day and night with Jane and Alison brought it all back to him. It was both comforting and frightening at the same time.
His thoughts were abruptly interrupted by the insistent sonic bleating of his mobile. Larkin jumped up, grabbing it from the shelf he had left it on and pulling the discarded terry robe around himself in case Alison waltzed in.
“Yeah?” He knew who it would be.
“Mission accomplished, boss.”
Andy.
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know. Middle of fuckin’ nowhere.”
After much prompting – with Larkin naming practically every town in the north – he eventually managed to work out that Andy was in Northumberland, specifically Warkworth.
“You coming back down?” Larkin asked him.
“I reckon you should come ’ere.” Andy seemed unusually grave.
Larkin, sensing the rare seriousness in his friend’s voice, didn’t push him for details over the phone. Instead, they made arrangements to meet in a tearoom-cum-craft shop in Warkworth in a couple of hours’ time.
As Larkin was switching off his phone and hunting for his clothes, he heard a voice behind him.
“Mornin’.”
Jane was standing against the doorway, kitted in black T-shirt and blue Levis, mug in her hand, smile on her face. Something about her stance gave Larkin a warm tingle inside. “I tried not to wake you.” Her eyes, dancing with shared secrets, never left his as she spoke. “Wanna coffee? There’s some made.”
He returned her smile. “Yeah, ta.”
She moved into the kitchen, hips swinging slightly more than usual, he noticed as he followed her. Then she turned to face him.
“How you feelin’?” she asked, without a trace of guilt or regret in her voice.
Larkin responded to her coded confidence. “Just fine.”
“Good dreams?” she asked.
Larkin nodded. “But I don’t know how you sleep with all that racket going on outside.”
“Oh, that. You grow accustomed to it.” She gave a half-laugh. “I’d probably miss it now if I moved.”
They drank their coffee, making morning-after small talk. Larkin glanced down the hall to see if there was any sign of Alison before biting the bullet. “So,” he said quietly, “was last night just a one-off?”
Jane looked up at him. “D’you want it to be?”
Larkin smiled, trying to mask the conflicting emotions running through him, not wanting to appear too eager, too vulnerable. “What d’you reckon? Leap of faith?”
Jane beamed. “We’ll see how it goes.”
As Larkin moved in to kiss her, Alison, with a child’s impeccable timing, appeared in the kitchen. They moved apart, leaving the girl looking slightly puzzled; Jane took that as her cue to leave, before explanations became necessary.
“Say hello to James for me,” Larkin said.
“Yeah, right,” Jane replied sarcastically. “I won’t say anything
at all to him if I don’t have to. I’ll just wait and see what happens.”
They gave each other a chaste kiss goodbye, with the promise of seeing each other later. Jane and Alison then left for the centre.
Larkin pulled on his T-shirt, Levis and boots, and went to meet Andy. He tried to put Jane out of his mind. He had work to do.
An hour and a half later, Larkin and Andy were drinking Earl Grey and eating passion cake in the tearoom at Warkworth. The village itself was pleasant enough – relatively unspoilt by contemporary standards, but still unable to escape the creeping gentrification of The British Heritage Theme Park plc. Andy steered Larkin to an outside table in a courtyard area with a fountain in the centre; they sat as far away from other customers as possible, aware that their conversation might cause any eavesdropping gentleladies to choke on their Lapsang Souchong.
“I feel like a member of the fuckin’ WI,” grumbled Andy, sipping his tea.
Larkin didn’t rise to the bait. “So,” he said, “how was your weekend?”
Andy’s face took on a grim aspect. “I tell you, mate – we’re onto somethin’ big an’ nasty here.”
Then Andy told him.
On the Friday evening he had followed Noble and the two boys up into Northumberland. Noble hadn’t noticed the tail: “Must’ve been too excited,” Andy said.
Andy had followed them off the main road and onto some minor roads, careful to keep a discreet distance. Eventually, Noble had pulled up at a large, secluded house, well set back from the road. Andy drove past, stopped the Vitara at the first available place – a layby – and ran back over the fields at the side of the house, crouching low, camera equipment at the ready.
As he neared the house, he became aware of the security cameras mounted to the walls. He quickly judged their range and scope and safely set himself up behind a concealing patch of hedge.
He had trained his telephoto lens on the windows; thankfully, the occupants hadn’t drawn the curtains. He could see three figures inside – two older, middle-aged men, and Noble. No sign of the two boys. “They must still be in there,” Andy reckoned, “’cos I
was sure neither of them had left. So I reckoned the best thing to do was get some snaps in and wait. So I kept watching until the lights went out, then went back to the jeep.”