For a big guy, he moved very fast. I didn’t even really see him do it; I felt the lamp snatched from my hand and then there it was in his.
For the first time, this felt real.
What if he hurts the baby?
I thought, and the greatest fear I had ever experienced grabbed my stomach and lungs with claws of cold. For a moment I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think.
‘Why don’t you open up your emails for me and let me take a look,’ he said, his voice calm and somehow even more threatening for it.
I did as he asked, thinking all the time about the baby. I didn’t care if having it was going to change my life. It was the most precious thing in the entire universe and if something happened to it I would die.
Jojo stood behind me being large and strong and dangerous. Of course there were no messages from June - she’d never emailed me in her life - but he made me go through my inbox for the past several months, and my address book. When he was satisfied that there was nothing there from her, he pulled my chair back.
‘We’re going downstairs,’ he said. He took me by the arm and manoeuvred me out of the room. The stairway was too narrow for us both to fit, so he walked me down ahead of him, my arm twisted behind my back.
My mind was fuzzy with fear. Surely once he realised that I didn’t know where June was, he’d go away without bothering to hurt me, right?
Unless, of course, he thought I was lying about not knowing. I remembered there was a list of phone numbers in a kitchen drawer, headed by JUNE in big red letters.
Jojo pushed me towards the kitchen, away from the living room and the telephone and the main escape route from the house. My back door was locked, but if I were much closer to it than he was, I could unlock it and run out into the back garden before he could catch me. But then what? My back garden was fenced in on all sides.
In the kitchen I felt a rush of relief as I spotted my mobile phone, which was on the counter near the kettle where I must have left it the afternoon before. I tried to reach my hand towards it without being obvious, but once again Jojo was surprisingly fast. He snatched it and dropped it into the pocket of his well-cut overcoat. Then he pushed me into a chair.
‘You might as well sit down,’ he said, ‘because I’m not going anywhere till you tell me where your sister is.’
‘Then you might as well sit down too - I don’t know where she is, so you’re going to be here for a very long time.’ I would have been proud of my bravado, if my voice hadn’t been shaking all over the place. ‘Why are you after her, anyway? I thought you two broke up after she broke your nose.’
Jojo’s face got darker and more dangerous. I guessed it was a bad idea to remind him about his nose. I shrank back in my chair.
‘If you know about my nose, you know about the money,’ Jojo growled, and he put his two paw-hands on the table in front of me and leaned so he was right in my face. He smelled of cologne and onions. ‘Fifty fucking grand of my money. I’m sick of your bullshit, now tell me where she is.’
The baby, the baby, I loved the baby and I had to say something to stop him from hurting it.
‘If you know June, you know that she is fully capable of staying here and not telling me anything about what she’d done or where she was going,’ I said. ‘If she had fifty grand, I didn’t know about it. She didn’t even give me money for groceries.’
Jojo straightened up and stared into my eyes. I stared back, as steadily as I could with my heart beating like a jackhammer and my guts churning liquid. At last, he stepped back.
‘When I find June, she is going to pay,’ he told me, ‘and if I find out you’ve been lying to me, so will you. I’ll be watching you.’
He swiped the kettle off the counter for good measure and as it clattered to the floor, he stomped out of the house.
‘Yeah, I can
write
villains scarier than you,’ I shot after him as soon as I knew he couldn’t hear me. When I tried to walk to the telephone, my legs were shaking so badly I had to hold on to the table so I wouldn’t fall down.
I took several breaths, waited till I was calmer, then opened my kitchen drawer, took out the list of June’s former phone numbers, tore it into very, very little bits, and stuffed it into the bottom of the bin.
Then I went to the phone. I had dialled half of Hugh’s number before I realised what I was doing and stopped myself.
What was I doing? I couldn’t phone Hugh. I had just made a fool of myself by kissing him. The last thing I needed to do was get all girly and call him to help me after a big mean man had broken into my house.
I disconnected and dialled the police instead.
18
‘Two gin and tonics please, Eleanor dear.’
I didn’t know why Martha and Maud bothered to tell me what they wanted to drink; they had the same thing every single night and I always started pouring the gin the minute they walked in the door. But apparently they gained some comfort from the ritual of pretending that one day, they might drink something different.
When I put the glasses on the bar Martha was shaking her head and sucking her teeth. ‘A break-in. You must have been scared out of your wits.’
Martha was the taller of the two old ladies. She had grey hair in a permanent; Maud had white hair cut very short. Martha usually wore coordinated polyester trousers and tops in bright colours, and costume jewellery, while Maud favoured beige and subtly flowered prints. Despite their different appearances, their mannerisms were so similar, (probably from years of drinking the same drink together every night), that when I had started working at the Mouse and Duck it had taken me months to be able to tell them apart.
I was quite sure I hadn’t told them, or anyone else, about the morning’s break-in. ‘How do you know about that, Martha?’
‘Oh, my grandson Todd is in the Thames Valley Police. He came round for lunch. He does every Saturday.’ She sucked her teeth again. ‘Did they take much, love?’
‘Only my mobile phone.’ And one of June’s boots, but that didn’t seem worth mentioning. ‘Does your grandson always tell you about Reading’s crime at lunchtime?’
‘Oh, no, he knows I know you,’ Martha said. ‘I’m always talking about our Eleanor.’
Martha talked about me at home? What on earth would she find to say?
‘Well, it’s nice of you to be concerned.’
Maud, who had been exchanging some words with Jerry at the other end of the bar, trotted over. From her expression I could tell that she had been discussing my break-in with Jerry.
‘You must have been frightened to bits, love, finding a strange man in your house like that,’ she said to me, ‘and especially with you in your condition, you poor thing.’ She patted my hand with her soft old lady’s hand.
I stared at her. I most definitely hadn’t mentioned the fact that I was pregnant. ‘How do you—’
She shook her head. ‘Don’t you worry about a thing, we’ll all look after you here, and Martha’s Todd says he’s unlikely to come back. Is it true it was a friend of your sister’s?’
Well, at least they didn’t know that June was my mother. ‘Her ex,’ I told them, figuring it was pointless to conceal anything about this as Todd knew all. ‘He reckons she took some money from him.’
They both shook their heads and sucked their teeth and made general elderly signs of outrage and disapproval with the modern world. Then Martha patted my hand as Maud had done and said, ‘Well, you take care of yourself; you don’t want any more sudden shocks when you’re in the family way’, and they went to their usual table.
My suspicions immediately went to Hugh, but I dismissed them. He hadn’t told Martha and Maud. In seven years he had never once let slip any of my secrets. He could also be very close about his own life when he chose.
Granted, my being pregnant was probably one of the biggest secrets ever. But old ladies had a sort of sixth sense for detecting pregnancy, didn’t they?
I wandered over. ‘Can I ask a question?’
‘Certainly, dear.’
‘How did you two know I’m pregnant?’
‘Your hips,’ said Maud.
‘Your face,’ said Martha.
‘Oh. Okay,’ I said, and went back to the bar none the wiser.
The door opened and Hugh came in. He’d obviously come straight from work because although he wore jeans and a jacket instead of chef whites, he had a streak of flour up one side of his face and through his dark hair. My heart leapt at the sight of him and for a split second our eyes met before I turned away and bent down to rearrange the crisps. I took quite a while debating whether nacho cheese Doritos should be housed next to the cheese and onion crisps because they shared a cheese factor, or whether they should be between Monster Munch and pork scratchings because of the alphabetical order. I decided on alphabetical order, but then I had to decide whether smoky bacon flavour crisps should be under ‘s’ or ‘b’.
When I straightened up, he was standing at the bar. I couldn’t help it; my gaze went straight to his lips and I remembered in exquisite, torturous detail how it had felt to have him kissing me.
‘What’s this Jerry tells me about a break-in?’ he demanded.
I spied a stray bag of Doritos amongst the cheese and onion and restored it to its rightful position. ‘Oh, it was fine, it was June’s ex looking for her.’
‘June’s violent ex?’
‘He wasn’t violent. We had a chat and he went away.’
‘And when did this happen?’
‘Just after -’
we snogged,
I thought, and, to my dismay, felt myself blushing. ‘Just after I left your place this morning.’
He ran his hand through his hair in the same place where the flour streak was; that was evidently how it had got there in the first place. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
I shrugged. ‘Oh, you know, it turned out fine, and I had the police there anyway.’
I couldn’t meet his eyes.
‘Eleanor, last time the neighbours’ cat came in and pissed on your curtains you called me within three minutes.’
‘It was nothing. Everything’s fine. Do you want a Coke, or a pint?’
He reached over the bar, grabbed my arm, and pulled me towards him. ‘Is it because we kissed?’ he asked, low enough so the rest of the pub couldn’t hear.
‘No!’ I laughed nervously. ‘No, of course not, that was a mistake.’
Hugh’s face looked like thunder. It was nearly close enough to kiss me again, a fact I did my best to ignore.
‘Yes, evidently it was,’ he said.
‘I mean, we were half asleep and you obviously thought I was someone else, and I obviously thought you were—’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ He let me go and straightened up to his full height. ‘Let’s never talk about it again. I’ll have a pint.’
‘Sure.’ I turned and began to pour it.
This was a good thing, I told myself. Hugh regretted kissing me as much as I regretted kissing him, which meant we were on the same level, and we could go back to being friends and I could ignore my attraction to him.
And yet a little bit of me - okay, a lot of me - felt disappointed.
Surely if he liked kissing me, even if he hadn’t meant to, he wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the whole thing? Surely he’d ask to kiss me again? I mean, Hugh really liked kissing girls, and he hadn’t been abstemious about kissing them up till now, when I was the girl.
He must be so spectacularly unattracted to me that the idea was repulsive. I put his pint on the bar, spilling quite a bit of it off the top. Hugh didn’t comment; he pushed over the money and took a long drink.
I heard a hammering sound from the other side of the pub. Grateful that something was interrupting the silence between me and Hugh, I looked over to see Jerry hanging a sign next to the other end of the bar. Hand-lettered on white cardboard was the big black command NO SMOKING. Jerry finished nailing the sign to the wall and came over to where Hugh and I were standing. He produced another sign and some nails, and began to ruin the wall over here, too.