Chapter 201 - 571 II

I put my hands on her hips, and then lower, round the curve of her bare arse. She started to move, slow, rocking forward and back along my thigh, pressing down, her pussy dragging over the seam of my jeans so the hard ridge of it ran right over her clit, and her breath went short.

I’d never seen her do this. She rode my thigh with her eyes half shut and her lip in her teeth, finding the angle, grinding down harder when she found it. I slid my hands up her sides and round her back and undid her bra, and pulled it off her arms, and her tits came free in the lamplight, full and heavy, her nipples dark and tight. I took one in my mouth and she grabbed the back of my head and held me there and rocked faster.

"That’s it," she said. "Oh, fuck. Keep your leg there. Right there, Danny."

I held my thigh dead still and pressed it up into her. Her cunt was soaking through my jeans now, a dark patch spreading, and her hips were jerking, and she was making a high noise in her throat with every rock. I pinched her other nipple between my fingers and she gasped and came, grinding down on my thigh with her nails in my shoulders and her head thrown back, shaking, crying out at the ceiling, riding it till the last pulse had gone through her.

She sat there on my thigh with her chest heaving and her hair in her face, and laughed, breathless, at the wet patch on my jeans.

"Look what I’ve done to your jeans."

"They’ll wash. I won’t, at this rate," I said, and she looked down at the bulge in my jeans and her eyes went dark again.

She slid off my lap onto her knees on the rug between my legs and got my belt undone, and dragged the wet jeans down my legs, and wrapped her fingers round my cock. She looked up at me with her hair falling over one eye.

"Your turn," she said. "And you’re not to move either."

She sucked me slow and deep with her hand at the root, her tongue flat on the underside, taking me all the way into her throat and drawing back to the tip, again and again, and I gripped the arm of the sofa and tried not to move. When I was close she felt it, and she pulled me out of her mouth and kept her hand going, faster, and knelt up and pressed my cock against her bare tits.

"Here," she said. "I want it on me."

I came over her tits with a groan I couldn’t hold in, in long hard spurts, my balls drawn up tight, and she held me there against her and watched it, with her mouth open, till I’d finished and was shaking.

She knelt back on her heels and looked down at herself in the lamplight, and then up at me, and smiled slowly.

"Shower, then bed," she said. "And in the morning you go down and tell that old man."

At 11 on Sunday Pemberton was in his cardigan at 17 with the crossword folded and the gas fire on, and 2 cups out on the little table. Danny had rung up from the desk first.

He listened to all of it without interrupting: Vic, and the card in his father’s capitals, and 571 Fridays on the back of a door that ended in a circle.

When Danny had finished, the old man sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the fire.

"I saw to the roof," he said.

He said it very quietly.

"See that the roof does not fall on him. That was the card. I had Mr Deniz up that ladder by Friday night and I have been pleased with that ceiling for 11 years. And for 9 of those years, every Friday night at the bottom of the same stairs, a man was taking your money and your supper, and I never once asked who came to the door downstairs."

"You’d no reason to ask, Mr Pemberton. Nobody in my life had."

"I could have asked Robin who else came to that building on a Friday. Robin knew every car that parked on Pembury Road." He turned his head. "How much?"

"61,900. Jodie worked it out off the door. Priya’s going after his estate for the last 6 years of it."

"Then I will give you the rest. Today. I have it."

"No. Not a penny of it."

"Mr Flynn."

"I mean it, Mr Pemberton. You paid Deniz on the stairs out of your own pocket for my ceiling, and you gave me the 3,200 for the shop’s plaster when the bank had me frozen. Vic Harrigan’s had 61,900 out of a boy who didn’t owe him a penny. He’s not having any of yours on top."

Pemberton looked at him for a moment. Then he nodded, once.

"Then I will do the other thing I have," he said. "I rang St Columba’s yesterday. A man called Clive answered and told me about his granddaughter at some length before he told me what I had rung for. Mrs Marsh’s funeral is Tuesday at 2 o’clock, at the chapel at the cemetery in Manor Park, the same one. She arranged it herself, Clive says, and paid for it in October, the week she came in. Nobody else is known to be going."

Danny sat forward.

"Can I ask you something about asking, then? She left me her book. On the back cover she wrote out how it’s done. Not for yourself. When the table’s out. Your own pen. Don’t sign it. You don’t get told yes, you find out." He took the book out of his pocket. "Is that right? Is that how you were taught?"

Pemberton didn’t take the book. He looked at the cover for a while without touching it.

"That is how I was taught," he said. "Word for word, by a man in that hall in 1958, who is long dead. She has left out one thing, or thought it too plain to write down."

"What thing?"

"You go yourself. You do not send it. You take it in your own hand and lay it on the table, and you stand there while it lies there, and then you walk out without looking back." He folded his hands on the crossword. "I can no longer go. So I cannot show you. But I can tell you that much."

"Tuesday, then. Ida’s funeral. I’ll come with you, and Jodie, and we’ll stand at the back."

"I know you will." He picked up the crossword. "And when they say her name, I shall learn it."

His mother had the letter written when he got to Battersea at 6. It was on the Formica on 3 sheets of lined paper from the same kind of pad she’d once given him, in her own writing, in capitals, with the pen still lying across the last page.

"Sit down," she said. "I’m reading it you. You don’t get a say in it, I just want you to hear it. I’ve been at it since 7 this morning, I’ve done it 4 times, the first 3 were too long and the third one had swearing in it, Denise said leave the swearing in, I said I’m not giving him the satisfaction.

"I’ve put the address on the envelope off what you gave me. Sharon Keeley, 14 Inlet Parade, Noosaville. I looked it up on the map at the library when you first gave it me. It’s by the water. I’ve put 3 stamps on it out of the book in my purse. The man at the post office always says 2 for Australia, but I’m not having this one come back for want of a stamp."

She picked up the pages and held them at arm’s length, and read.

"DENNIS. VIC HARRIGAN IS DEAD. HE DIED ON THE 11TH OF OCTOBER IN A FLAT IN STOCKWELL WITH YOUR SON SITTING WITH HIM. YOUR SON GOT HIM WATER.

"YOUR SON PAID HIM 100 POUNDS A WEEK AND THEN 120 FOR 11 YEARS FROM WHEN HE WAS 17 BECAUSE OF WHAT YOU WROTE ON THE BACK OF THAT CARD. 571 FRIDAYS. 61,900 POUNDS. HE KEPT COUNT ON THE BACK OF HIS DOOR. I HAVE SEEN THE PHOTOGRAPHS.

"YOUR LETTERS SAID DON’T PAY HIM. I KEPT THEM FROM HIM IN A BAG IN MY WARDROBE. THAT IS MINE TO CARRY AND I WILL CARRY IT. WHAT YOU WROTE IN THAT PUB IS YOURS.

"DON’T SEND ANY MORE 20s. DON’T SEND POSTCARDS. YOUR SON IS 28 AND HE IS DOING WELL WITHOUT A PENNY FROM YOU AND HE HAS A GIRL WHO MAKES HER OWN COATS. YOU WOULD NOT KNOW WHAT TO SAY TO EITHER OF THEM.

"I WAS RIGHT ABOUT YOU. YOU SAID SO YOURSELF."

She put the pages down.

"No name at the bottom," she said. "He’ll know who it’s from. He’ll know the capitals. He taught me them, the first year we were courting, he said my writing was too small for a man to read."

Danny sat at the Formica with his hands round a cup of tea he hadn’t drunk.

She’s put Jodie in it, and the door. She’s put herself in it too, the bag in the wardrobe, and said she’ll carry it.

"Send it, Mum. Every word of it, as it is."

"I wasn’t asking."

At 9 she put her coat on over her apron and walked to the postbox at the end of the estate, past Denise’s lit window, along the walkway and down the stairs and across the forecourt to the red box under the streetlight at the corner of the road. Danny walked beside her. It was cold and clear and there was frost starting on the cars.

She took the envelope out of her coat pocket and looked at it, at the capitals and the name of a woman she’d never met.

Then she pushed it into the slot, and held the metal flap open with 2 fingers for a second after it had gone, as if she was checking it had really dropped, and let it go.