Cathy got off the bus, she felt the sun so hot she knew it would soon burn through the white cheesecloth of her loose shirt. She pulled up her collar to protect the back of her neck and walked down Rockham High Street, feeling the hem of her long skirt fluttering against her ankles and hearing her sandals slapping against the pavement.
Every door on the High Street was open and every shopkeeper out on the pavement on boxes or fold-out chairs, and although they were normally a garrulous bunch they now sat silently, as if the humidity and the traffic fumes had drained them of all life.
Her route took her past Rockham police station, a fortified brick one-storey in the midst of run-down shops. They’d tried to pretty it up by grassing the front and then ruined the effect by planting an oversize ‘Welcome to Rockham Police Station’ noticeboard on the lawn. Now a couple of workmen were levering out this board while a third was up a ladder manoeuvring a CCTV camera. The sight perplexed her. Were they shutting the police station, as it was rumoured they planned eventually to do, even before the Lovelace had come down?
‘That’s it.’ The men prised the sign from its chained surrounds. They dropped it in the midst of glass that, once a protection against the elements, was now littering the lawn. That’s when Cathy saw that someone had graffitied on the sign, so that it now read: ‘Welcome to Wreck’em Police Station’.
‘Witty,’ Cathy said.
‘Think so, do you?’ One of the men shot her a dirty look.
There was a new sign on the edge of the lawn near Cathy, which the men went to fetch. It was clearly very heavy. As they turned, one of them stumbled. The sign teetered. Without thinking, Cathy put out a hand to stop it falling.
‘Keep off,’ one of the men yelled. Seeing how she jumped, he lowered his voice. ‘Didn’t mean to frighten you. It’s this paint, you see. It’s AI – Anti Interference. Dyes your hand.’ He used a forearm to wipe away the perspiration that, having collected on his forehead, was beginning to drip down. ‘Not that you’d know you’d been marked, not until they flash you with an infrared gun and your hand lights up like it’s Christmas. Sticks to your skin for a week – fuck knows what chemicals have ate into you in the meantime. No washing it off neither. That’s why we’re wearing gloves in this fucking heat.’
‘What happens if somebody touches it by mistake?’
‘No chance of that. We’re gonna glass it in and then embed the post in concrete – the lawn is history. And after that we’ll fence the lot in.’
‘That’s overkill, isn’t it?’
‘You think so? It’s the badlands around here, and from what we’ve heard it’s only going to get badder.’ He grimaced. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, we have to get on.’
She left them to it, walking along the High Street until she turned off to go down the market. There the ice was melting almost as fast as the fishmongers could lay it down, so that water was dripping off the trays onto the pavement and into the gutters, flavouring the air with the stink of fish. Careful to hold her skirt up, she stepped onto the pavement and kept going, passing a pound shop, one of three along the parade. She stopped by a display of plastic boxes of various sizes, and mops and brooms that had spilt out onto the pavement and almost into the road.
‘Jayden?’
Jayden, who had been picking up the fallen brooms, looked up. A taciturn boy, he nodded to her.
‘You were out early this morning.’
He shrugged and said something that sounded like ‘I dunno.’
‘Not at school?’
He shook his head and didn’t speak, but whether this was because he was truanting and didn’t want to say so, or because he couldn’t summon up the energy for an explanation, she couldn’t tell.
‘Come and have some cake with us after your tea.’
‘Okay,’ he said. And gave a little smile. Which she knew was the best she was going to get out of him.
She moved on only to stop again at the last shop in the run. It wasn’t her favourite, but it was the cheapest. She reached over the display of peppers and okra and tomatoes to the plantain at the back. She had just picked up a piece when a voice sounded in her ear: ‘That plantain’s tired.’
She looked up and straight into the sun, so that all she first saw against the dazzle was a dark shape. She took a step back, blinked and her vision cleared: ‘Banji. You scared me.’
He smiled and his eyes crinkled. Which she’d always liked. She smiled back.
He took the plantain she’d been reaching for, turning it over to expose a bruised underside. ‘If you have to shop here, you’ve got to shop clever.’ He put the piece back and picked through the pile. ‘This one’s fresher.’
As she took it from him, his other hand touched and held hers.
‘You’re so cool,’ she said.
‘I was born cool.’ He smiled again.
They stood for a moment not speaking, and she thought how mismatched they – a stout white woman and a tall black man, standing close – must look, and then she thought that she should take back her hand.
She didn’t want to.
‘How was Lindi this morning?’ he said.
‘Disappointed you weren’t there. And stroppy as hell.’
‘Can’t imagine where she gets that from.’ Another smile as he increased his pressure on her hand.
She looked down at his long brown fingers with their broad square-cut nails and the back of his hand with its raised veins. She saw her own hand in his, plump and white, as he continued, gently, to squeeze it.
It was fifteen years since he’d left, and his going had been so brutal and so final she’d neither expected to see him again nor hoped that she might. But now she found herself in the grip of some of the feelings she had thought long gone. He’s playing me, she told herself. And said, ‘Where did you go this morning?’, although she knew he wouldn’t like the question.
He took his hand away so abruptly that she was pulled forwards.
‘What the hell?’ She backed away from him. ‘Why do you always have to be so difficult?’
Not often that she shouted at him, and now she saw, in his rapid blinking, how she had taken him by surprise. Good, she thought.
‘Hey.’ He reached out to tap her, gently, on the nose. ‘I didn’t mean to unbalance you.’
If he thought he could win her over so easily, he better think again. She turned her wrist to look at her watch and, although she had nowhere to be, said, ‘I’m late.’ Plantain in hand, she went into the shop.
There was a queue by the till. She wandered through the narrow aisles, giving herself space in which to cool down and Banji time to make good his escape. But when at last she re-emerged, she found that he had waited for her.
‘I’m sorry.’
