The Trawlerman, стр. 54
Terry was just a thoughtful man. He had been through bad things himself. And he was only trying to help, she told herself.
Thirty-nine
Despite that, there was a kind of stiffness to the rest of the meal. They stuck to safe topics; which TV shows they liked, the best gigs they had been to. He had seen Nirvana at Reading; she said Soul II Soul at Brixton Academy. For dessert he ordered a sorbet with genever. When she said she didn’t want anything, he ordered two spoons and pushed one across the table towards her, so she pecked at his with her spoon, eating most of it though she hadn’t wanted it, trying to lighten the mood.
‘Quite a place, isn’t it? Enjoying yourself?’
‘I am,’ she said, ‘Yes.’ They ordered coffee. ‘Décaféiné,’ Alex added. The restaurant was in a dull part of the town, so there was no point suggesting a walk. She felt trapped in there with him until the time came to take the ferry home, feeling like she had ruined his treat. When the bill came, he tried to pull out his wallet again in a show of gallantry, but she paid.
On the ferry home she stood on the starboard deck and looked north. The lights of a container ship came on, blaring on the horizon.
Under the overcast sky, the Dover Strait had turned grey. She thought of Frank Hogben. In Curly’s boat she had been down in among the waves; up on the deck of this big blue and white car park of a ship, they felt a long way below her.
And just as she was thinking about Frank Hogben, trying to puzzle things out, her phone came back in range and beeped with a message from Zoë:
Hope u r having a good time. Staying with T & S tonight. Will you be OK on yr own??? x
As she was looking at it, another pinged in from an unrecognised number:
Z says you want to meet. Will message you tomorrow at 9.
She broke out into a grin.
Terry noticed. ‘News?’
‘Just an old friend who I haven’t heard from in a while.’
She replaced the phone in her bag and stared a little longer at the dark sea. ‘Tell me about your addiction,’ she said.
‘Really?’
‘Go on. You know everything about my catastrophes now.’ She looked up from the sea below and looked straight at him. ‘Even things up a bit.’
‘I don’t really talk about all that that much.’ For the first time, he looked less sure of himself. ‘I was never actually a junkie. I was an addict. I had enough money to fund the habit and so I managed it. There’s such a cliché about addiction; I was nothing like that.’
‘God forbid you are a cliché,’ she said.
His grin was not so bad, she thought. ‘It was a bit like that, to be honest. I would have rather died than look like a junkie. I kind of organised myself around my needs. I’m quite an organised, single-minded person.’
‘I can see that.’
‘I made sure I did my job properly so I would have time to take drugs. It made life extremely simple. It gave me priorities. Unfortunately, the biggest priority was buying and taking drugs, which meant I couldn’t sustain a relationship. I had occasional girlfriends, but never for very long because I always had to lie to them about my life and they always played second fiddle to . . . the other thing.’
He looked at her, and there was something very direct about his gaze.
‘It’s one of the things that made me want to change, if I’m honest.’
When they called for foot passengers to disembark she was oddly relieved to be in England again. In the queue for passport control he said, ‘Will you come back to my place, for a drink?’
Her daughter would not be home. There was no reason to say no. ‘OK. Just a quick one.’
She flicked through her passport. In the last few years she had only used it to apply for bank accounts. It would expire in a year. She examined the photograph in the back, taken when she was still working in London and when Zoë had still been in primary school. It was a picture of a woman who seemed a lot younger and a lot more carefree who stared back at the camera. Her hair was shorter; maybe she should try that again. She had no memory at all of the blue top she was wearing.
‘Show me your passport photograph,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’
He turned away from her, facing in the direction of the slowly moving queue. ‘We’ll be there in a minute,’ he said.
‘Go on. Show me it. Or is that awful?’
He ignored her, looking ahead. Showing each other your passport photos was one of the things you did, wasn’t it? Like squeezing into photo booths together.
‘Show me it,’ she insisted, laughing. ‘It can’t be that bad.’
‘OK,’ he said tightly, pulling the passport from the inside pocket of his pale-blue jacket. He flicked through it and opened it at his photo and held it out towards her. ‘There. OK?’
She looked at it. From a distance it appeared to be a perfectly ordinary photograph of Terry, hair a little longer perhaps but there was nothing to be embarrassed about.
She reached out to take it, but he pulled it back and put it into his pocket.
When they approached the immigration officer, he said, ‘You go first.’
When she was waved on, she turned and watched him take the