Chapter 190: A New One III

I put my hands under her arse and lifted her, and the water took her weight, and she wrapped her legs round my waist. She was light as anything. I walked her into deeper water till it was up to my chest and her shoulders were under, and her hair spread out on the surface round her.

"Lie back," I said. "I’ve got you. Lie back on the water."

She let go of my neck and lay back, slowly, with her arms out and my hands under the small of her back, and floated. Her breasts broke the surface, white and wet, with the nipples tight and dark from the cold air above the water. Her hair went out round her head like weed.

I hooked my thumbs in the black knickers and drew them down her legs and off her feet, and let them go, and they sank and lay on the bottom of the pool in the blue light.

"Danny. They’re the only pair I’ve brought."

"You’ll go back up in the towel."

I took her legs and put one over each of my arms and pulled her to me through the water. She floated there with her thighs open across my forearms and her cunt right there at my hips, and I got my boxers down with one hand and let my cock press against her, and she shut her eyes.

I pushed into her slowly. In the water her pussy was slippery at first and then tight and hot inside, hotter than the pool, and she arched her back and her breasts came right up out of the water with the drops running off them.

"Oh, fuck," she said to the ceiling. "Oh, that’s... don’t let go of me."

"I won’t. I’m holding you."

I held her by the thighs and fucked her slowly, pulling her onto me through the water and letting her drift back, onto me and back, and every time I pulled her in the water slapped between us and ran up over her stomach. She floated with her arms out and her mouth open, with nothing under her but water and me, and every stroke rocked her whole body on the surface.

The filter hummed. The river went by black outside the glass.

I let go of one thigh and put my thumb on her clit, under the water, and rubbed it in slow circles. She lost her float completely. Her head went under and came up spluttering and swearing, and she grabbed my shoulders and pulled herself up onto me and locked her ankles behind my back and rode me there with me standing in water up to my chest, with her arms round my neck and the water churning round us.

"Keep going, keep going, Danny, harder..."

I held her arse and pulled her down onto me hard, again and again, and she came with her teeth in my shoulder and her cunt gripping me in hard waves, and a sound out of her that went all the way round that dark room.

I couldn’t hold it. Then I was coming too, buried in her, with my balls drawn up tight and my feet sliding on the tiles, and the two of us went under together and came up gasping and laughing with water in our noses.

We hung on the rail at the deep end till we had our breath back, with her chin on my shoulder.

"I’m not getting those knickers," she said.

"I’ll get them. I’m the one that threw them away."

He dived for them. They’d drifted down the slope and were lying in 7 feet of blue water, black against the white tiles, and when he came up with them in his fist she was sitting on the edge of the pool with her legs in the water and the towel round her shoulders, watching him, not laughing any more.

"If you close mine, I never get to see any of it again." Jodie pulled the towel tighter. "Not the gold on your phone, not a door. You’d tell me about it over chips with your phone zipped in your pocket, and I’d watch you check it was still zipped."

At 10 o’clock his mother had the kettle on, as promised, and her feet up on the second chair with the beer mat still under its leg, and she talked before he’d got his coat off.

"Don’t sit there, Jodie, sit on the good one. I’ve had a day. We’ve had a lady on the ward 4 days who won’t eat, 89, she says she’s waiting for her husband to bring her proper food, and her husband died in 2003. So who’s going to tell her that? Nobody. The doctor said leave her. So we leave her.

"And then the student nurse dropped a bedpan in the corridor, full, and I’m not saying any more about that at my own table. And Denise has been round about her grandson’s college again, she can’t let it go. She’s got his timetable on her fridge. Engines on a Tuesday.

"Anyway. Sit down. Tell me. All of it, you said. I’ve been stood in that sluice since 5 past 2 not knowing what all of it is."

He told her. The car at midnight. Mare Street, and the vape shop where Robin’s office had been, and the phone box gone. Ida Marsh, and 61 years, and what she’d asked for 11 years ago on a Saturday night. The woman in the grey coat on the walkway was Ida’s. He told her that the woman remembered she’d had her shoes off.

His mother put her mug down very carefully on the Formica.

"She remembered my feet," she said.

"Ida says that’s her job."

Then he told her about the records, and who gets written down, and that the house looks and doesn’t listen.

His mother looked at the phone, face down on the table beside his hand.

"Show me," she said.

"No, Mum. I’m not doing that."

"Danny. I’m your mother. Show me this phone that’s been paying for everything. Show me what it says."

"If I show you, you go on the list, Mum. That’s how it works. Whoever I show the work to, the house writes them down. I showed Jodie at 20 to 12 on a Monday and she was on it before we’d gone to sleep. I’m not putting you on it. Not ever."

She sat back in her chair. He watched her work it through, the way she did a rota on the back of an envelope.

"That’s why," she said slowly. "That’s why you’ve never got that thing out at this table. You’ve had it face down every Sunday since October."

"Since the night Jodie went on it. I didn’t know the rule then. I knew what happened the one time I held it out."

"And you showed her." She looked at Jodie, and her voice had gone quiet. "Before me."

"He showed me before either of us knew what it could do," Jodie said.

His mother didn’t speak while the fridge hummed. Then she reached across the Formica and turned the phone a quarter turn with one finger, still face down, the way you’d straighten a picture.

"Then it stays like that," she said. "And this record. The one you get to close. Whose?"

"I don’t know yet. Jodie says Mr Pemberton’s. Mr Pemberton says Jodie’s. They’ve both told me to stop asking them."

"Then I’ll tell you mine, and you needn’t answer it." His mother took her feet off the chair. "The old man’s. She’s young and she’s got you, and she’d had a good look at you before she climbed on the back of that scooter. He’s got a dead brother and 2 litres of water a day. Let him go in the ground with nobody counting him. That’s what I’d want, if it was me."

Jodie looked at her lap.

"And Danny." His mother picked her mug back up. "You said all of it. You’ve not told me the Monday."

"That’s not today’s, Mum. That’s ours. I’ll tell you it Friday. After the funeral. When I’ve stood next to him and watched them put his brother in."

She looked at him across the Formica, and he let her look.

"Then I’ll swap my Friday," his mother said. "And you’ll come on your own."

They got the night bus on Battersea Park Road at 20 to 12, upstairs at the front. Jodie fell asleep against his shoulder before they were over the river, with the wet ends of her hair in his collar and the black knickers in her coat pocket still damp from the pool.

Danny sat with the dark windows going past and London lit up yellow in them.

2 votes for him, his own vote for her, and Ida wouldn’t give one. They don’t add up to anything. It’s mine.

He took Pemberton’s fountain pen out of his inside pocket, carefully, so as not to wake her. He uncapped it with his teeth. He pushed back the cuff of his left sleeve, and on the soft inside of his wrist, where nobody would see it unless he showed them, he wrote 1 word in the old man’s black ink.

He blew on it until the ink was dry.

He capped the pen and pulled his cuff down over the word.

Then he put his arm round her.