Cages by David Mark (reading fiction TXT) 📗

it could only have been self-inflicted. Your Mr Windsor was neither use nor ornament but those injuries were bad. I don’t know enough about the prison system to say whether this is all normal but it’s not going to look good for the governor and staff, is it? A call to the papers … even a piece in the local rag will be enough to get the libertarians talking about prison brutality. And I say that as a bloody libertarian. But it feels like he’s manipulated this. Didn’t you say he shouldn’t even have been there? On the course, I mean? And the creative writing – the one that made out it was by you. Christ, if he’s doing all this just to get close to you …’

He stops talking. The room fills with the sound of raindrops: hoofbeats on metal. Annabeth stares past him, to where the snow globe sits, like a trophy, atop the little bookshelf. She swallows, painfully. She can feel Rufus’s unasked questions darting about and around her: kite-ribbons slashing and cutting at her exposed skin.

She knows she has to get herself together. She’s ignored all the phone calls. Switched off her phone. Doesn’t want to be party to the inevitable. She has no doubt he will insist upon speaking to her. Has no doubt what he wants.

‘Annabeth, how can I help you?’ he asks, crouching down beside her. ‘I can stay. I don’t need to go back home, there’s no bugger interested if I’m there or not. Tell me what I can do …’

Annabeth looks up at him. Sees the gun-dog earnestness in his features: the sad solemnity in his eyes.

She manages a smile, before she turns away from him, and curls into a ball.

Then, into the covers, she mutters one-word, barely heard, ‘Leverage.’

TWENTY-FIVE

All in all, Rufus Orton is rather enjoying his little sojourn in East Yorkshire. It’s been quite exciting. He doesn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t this. Not sex criminals and classroom brawls, fistfights, beatings and coded messages. He’s heard it said that it’s never dull in Hull. He feels inclined to agree.

He’s taken up a sentry position in the armchair, fingers drumming idly on the armrests. He hasn’t helped himself to a whisky as he thinks there’s still a slim chance that the next few hours will take him home, but he’s experiencing the twitching thirst of a seasoned drinker who hopes the first sip of the day isn’t far off. He shuffles his thoughts. Sucks his teeth. Stares through the window at the darkening sky and watches the rain. It’s slowed down a little but there’s still a menace to the air and the big front window is almost opaque with smeared raindrops.

On the sofa, Annabeth has been snoring, softly, for the best part of the last two hours. He pottered around for a while, making tea, opening cupboards, drying a few dishes on the drainer. He felt the soil in the pot plants and gave them a drink. Opened a few drawers in the kitchen. Admired the neatness. Papers held together with different coloured paper clips: bills, mostly, together with insurance documents, driving licence and the paperwork for her car. He cannot help but compare the order with his own haphazard kitchen. From the outside, he and Shonagh have the kind of home that those with a love of the countryside aspire to retiring to. It’s a little tumbledown, but with plenty of character and a lintel above the door declaring it to have been built in 1729. He often hears the admiring superlatives gushed out by the ramblers who potter down through the woods that lead into the overgrown orchard by the back lane. When they find out it’s home to a writer they positively explode with delight, as if having stumbled into a portal to a bygone age, when the tortured genius could scribble his prose by candelight while downing claret and gnawing, menacingly, on the rind of a mutton chop. Rufus enjoys their imaginings – they fit neatly with the way he hopes to be viewed by literary historians of the future. But his reality is very different. Inside, the house looks to have been recently burgled. The table in the big farmhouse kitchen is positively groaning beneath the weight of unpaid bills and enforcement notices. There are too many empty bottles to fit in the recycling and he hasn’t the heart to cancel his morning delivery of the Guardian, which are now stacked in great mouldy piles wherever he can find a space between the unwashed pots and the sticky, gleaming green glass. The flagged floor is mouse-droppings and cat-piss. Dried flowers hang from the eaves and beams, thick with cobwebs and studded with dead insects. His rocking chair – a salvaged maternity chair recovered from a jumble sale – is the only space unencumbered by any kind of grime, though there is a perfect arse-shape in the fabric that bears witness to the hours he spends there, laptop or paperback on his knee, writing, reading, watching porn or pretending to watch a documentary while working his way through old episodes of QI. He finds the neatness of Annabeth’s little semi-detached almost erotically beguiling. Feels a certain something for Annabeth, too. She’s certainly no beauty, but she has a face that would be handsome if not for the sternness about the mouth or the dark beneath the eyes. His wife, Shonagh, is without doubt the more classically beautiful, but it counts for nought when she is looking at him the same way other people may examine a slug making its way through their salad. They’re almost separated. Not quite. Not officially. There’s the girls to consider and they have to work out how to divide up the debts, but he spends most of his life in the kitchen while she is up and down the country bidding for work or delivering fabric samples – taking advantage of the credit card to stay in