Purgatory Is a Place Too Read online

  “I know,” I sighed. “It must be very galling for Pete.”

  “Pete wouldn’t be winning if Tyler was still around. And he shouldn’t be winning with you around. But I’ve watched you carefully divvying up the titles between the two of you so as not to offend his ego. You don’t owe Pete anything! He did the dirty on you something rotten.”

  He waited. I said nothing.

  “Paul knows you’ll bust a gut to beat him, and if you do that you’ll have had to pass Pete too, without even thinking about it, because Paul will be leaving him for dust…”

  I bit my lip. “Please promise me Paul won’t ever just let me win. I have to know that we’re really both busting a gut…”

  Rob had that ironic look on his face again. “You females! Just because you yourself choose to win or lose for some sort of psychological game playing of your own you imagine everyone else is doing it! You’d never ever catch me throwing a race. I race to win, or I don’t go out there at all. Paul’s just the same. Believe me, we were cut-throat rivals for years!”

  “Ok.” I looked at him. He looked back. I couldn’t hold back the question. “So who’d have come out on top in the end, do you think? Me or Tyler?”

  He thought about it. “I reckon it would have been neck and neck. Sometimes you, sometimes him, depending on the conditions and hiccoughs on the day.”

  “And have I any chance of beating Paul?”

  He smiled slowly at me. “We’ll find out that later this year, won’t we?”

  Cody’s Dad rang to see how she was doing.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “She seemed strangely quiet after her first couple of outings…” He reported.

  “Well she came in a bit cocky thinking she knew it all, and when you’re sixteen it’s a bit humiliating to be told that you have to unlearn everything and start again… How does she seem now?”

  “Back to her usual self – it’s all she can talk about! But I just thought I’d check up on your end…”

  “She just needs to learn to concentrate,” I suggested.

  “Tell me about it!” He groaned. “At one point we tried to get her diagnosed with ADHD, but they said that basically she just had a butterfly mind…”

  Great! I thought. You’ve foisted your hyperactive kid on me to keep out of your hair for a year.

  “While you’re on, Mr. Frost…” I said cautiously.

  “Dave, please.”

  “Ok, Dave. I don’t really know whether I should tell you this or not, but I’d never forgive myself if something happened and I hadn’t…”

  “What?” He said sharply, immediately on the alert from my tone of voice.

  “Do you know her friend Jessica?”

  “Yeah, we’re not that fond of Jessica. Could do with her leaving Cody alone…”

  “Well Cody brought her along with her one weekend, and Jessica told me in confidence that she’d been threatened by some Asian men who said that they’d attack her friends and Jessica is worried because she knows they’ve seen her with Cody.”

  There was a heavy silence at the other end.

  “So how old are Cody’s brothers?” I asked.

  “Fourteen and eighteen,” he said abruptly.

  “So I just wondered if you could give them the heads up to keep an eye out around Cody. I’m telling you these men are seriously bad news. You must intervene the second you get wind of any Asian guys around Cody.”

  “That sounds a bit…” He hesitated.

  “Rascist? I know! But it just so happens that the men that Jessica is in trouble with are Asian, so it’s just a plain fact I’m afraid.” In my own mind I was challenging myself as to why I was avoiding the word ‘Pakistani’. I knew I was conditioned not to sound prejudiced.

  “So have you told Cody?” He asked.

  “I didn’t want to scare her.”

  “Best it comes from you. She’ll think I’m over-reacting else, and she knows we don’t like Jessica…”

  I sighed. Another difficult conversation to surmount.

  “Dad’s done an interview for Stoxradio!” Jo announced as I walked into the back shed at work during my lunch break. She’d been messing on my tablet again. “He kept that pretty quiet!”

  I rolled my eyes. “Go on then!” I sighed.

  Jonny was cheerfully interviewing him at the track on the day of the World Qualifier at the Mendips Raceway. You could hear all the noise of another race being run in the background.

  “So a decade retired and staying in the background and then you burst back onto our tracks leading at the front as though you’ve never been away! That’s quite an achievement!”

  “Well my excellent new car helps…” Paul said.

  I listened hard my eyes narrowed.

  “So, yes, this is the car that your team member Eve McGinty designed and built I believe? What’s so special about it?”

  “I think she’d prefer to keep that a closely guarded secret!” He joked. “But it’s just come through its first major scrutineering without too much sucking of teeth, so that’s a bonus.”

  “God yes!” I exclaimed at Jo. “I completely forgot that it would have been examined after a second place in the Qualifier. Thank God for that!”

  She nodded. “Yep, that’s a big relief.”

  “Yeah, I mean I really talked to everyone in authority that I could about it, but they’re always suddenly cutting up stiff about stuff which a year ago they just ignored so if they’d wanted to be obstructive I’m sure they could have found something to randomly object to!”

  “So Eve McGinty herself hasn’t actually raced against you yet, am I right? She seems to be staying up North. Is there a reason for this?”

  “You’ll have to ask Eve that,” Paul said dryly. “I couldn’t possibly speculate. She likes to throw the odd curve ball does Eve…”

  Jo switched it off. “That’s all there is of Dad.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. “I wonder how we can annoy him even more? He’s a bit pissed off about us avoiding him isn’t he? I need to really work on the car in readiness for the day when we finally can’t put it off any longer. I need to make this moment of breathing space really count!”

  My own Dad rang me up and asked me to come round. I was a bit worried. He didn’t normally. We’d had quite a nice patch last year where he’d been coming up to the Satterthwaites’ with his welding equipment to help me build my car. It got him out of the house, he said. But I’d not seen him since Christmas.

  Turned out they’d had the results of all Ethan’s tests.

  “Some sort of arrested development. It hasn’t got a name. They don’t know what’s causing it. But they say we have to be prepared for him never walking or talking or even being toilet trained.”

  I wanted to say Shit! That’s awful! But given the last part of the sentence being about incontinence, I realised it would be inappropriate – or more to the point, too insensitively appropriate…

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  We sat there in silence. I felt so sorry for Dad. For them both I suppose. Pauline had been so thrilled to have a chance to have a baby at last. Dad had been utterly dismayed at the idea, but had resigned himself to it. If Ethan had been normal, it would all be working out pretty well by now, but for Dad to be lumbered with a special needs kid when he hadn’t wanted a second family in the first place, was going to be hard for him to bear.

  And the awful thing was, Ethan was just the most unattractive creature. He didn’t respond to anything you did, so you just couldn’t get fond of him. I had been feeling guilty for at least two years, feeling that I should have some attachment to him by now. I’d worked at a learning disability college for goodness sake, and absolutely adored the students there, so I really ought to be able to cope with Ethan. But Dad had admitted to me that he too couldn’t relate to him. So Dad must be feeling even worse.

  “Do you want to come out for a drink?” I offered.

  “Can’t,” he said abruptly without e
xplaining why.

  He didn’t say goodbye when I left.

  It wasn’t so far from my old house to where John Holt, our local policeman lived, so on the spur of the moment I turned down his street and drew the bike up outside.

  When John opened the door to me he half laughed. “I never know whether to dread your appearance or not,” he said. “It’s been a while…”

  “Can I come in?” I asked.

  He opened the door and we went towards their living room. There was a slam of the kitchen door and a young teenage girl stormed by us and up the stairs, her legs flashing white under the extremely short skirt, and her high wedge heels on her shoes thundering.

  “God is that Heather?” I queried amazed, “She’s grown up!”

  He pulled a face. “The hormones are starting.”

  I laughed. “So is it all door slamming and screaming?” I teased.

  He frowned slightly.

  “Don’t you remember Kathleen Quinn telling you once that your own little cutie would one day be all screaming and door slamming?”

  He frowned a bit more and then looked enlightened. “Oh yes, I remember now. The case of the missing Dumbo video!”

  “Quinn’s such an idiot!” I dismissed.

  “So what can I do for you?” He asked.

  “I’ve just come to you to get an opinion,” I explained. “I want to run something past you…”

  I gave him an edited account of the Jessica situation. “What do you think?” I asked. “Have you come across any more of this?”

  To give him his due, he seemed to be sifting through what he knew, rather than dismissing me out of hand. “Thing is, Eve. This is a massive sprawling town and there’s a lot of deprivation in some quarters, so there’s a lot of disturbed kids out there, and a heavy load on the Children’s Services with a lot of ‘looked after’ children. And our demographic is thirty percent Pakistani origin Muslims, and ten percent Indian Subcontinent, and you know that this town has a lot of civic pride that it’s had virtually no race relations problems, unlike some of the other Northern post-industrial towns. The BNP lost their deposit round here in the last election, and UKIP were hardly on the radar, and the local schools have a rigorous multicultural approach trying to prevent any de-facto segregation taking place.” He spread his hands. “So given that there’s a nearly fifty percent chance of any boy a young girl goes out with being Asian, it’s hard to read anything into it… And once a girl has gone out with one lad from the Pakistani community, she’ll have got to know all his friends, and then she’ll introduce them to her friends and so on… This town really prides itself on getting the different communities to stay in dialogue with each other. So surely it can only be considered a positive thing if the young people are breaching the race boundaries and inter-marrying… You yourself know well enough that it’s not just a white/asian thing, it’s also a Pakistani/Indian thing…”

  He’d been the one who’d answered the 999 call when Nasim’s brother had fire-bombed our house when she was holed up with us, wanting to marry Rajesh.

  I didn’t try to argue with him. I could see his point. And he might be right. But it had also acutely summed up just why this town might still be determined to ignore anything that smacked of the community dysfunction that had cropped up elsewhere.

  I thanked him politely and left. It hadn’t helped me decide whether what Jessica claimed was true or not. But it had helped to put it into context for me.

  With all this poisonous stuff in my head, it seemed kind of wrong to go and visit Nasim, but she was home from Oxford for the Easter break, so I really ought to.

  Their flat was modern and cosy. We curled up together on the settee and I caught up on her news. I no longer had to go and fetch her mother secretly to come and see her, as thankfully her father had relented and allowed her mother to get a taxi round here once a week. He himself was still keeping up an icy gulf between them.

  “Does Sahmir still go and visit Tariq in prison?” I asked.

  Nasim shook her head.

  “When’s Tariq due out?” I asked, crossing my fingers out of her sight.

  She frowned, calculating. “Well he got eight years, and he’ll probably do four and then be let out on licence, so not any time soon. At least, not this year…”

  Great! I thought.

  “Sahmir’s turned out ok hasn’t he?” I commented approvingly. Rajesh had got him a job as a trainee soft-ware developer at his company, so Nasim’s Dad ought to feel a bit grateful for that at least…

  She smiled. “Yes, I think so too! And he’s taken everything he’s learned at Rajesh’s place back into Dad’s business and completely transformed the way they run it, so Dad’s quite impressed I think. Sahmir comes round here quite often to hang out with Raj when he wants to get away from the family.”

  I could see she was pleased. The desperate measures she’d had to take to follow her heart were paying off. A happy marriage with the man she loved, a law degree in progress up at Oxford, and fifty percent of her nearest and dearest still in contact with her. Compared to how it could have turned out, that was quite a result.

  It was only after I left that I realised that I had avoided talking about myself. I just couldn’t tell her what had been going on with Jessica, she’d be too offended.

  Jessica still hadn’t got back to me. So finally I drove round to her house.

  “Is she in?” I asked her mother.

  “Upstairs in her bedroom for once,” she said. Then pulled a face. “Although sometimes we think that only to find out she’s sneaked out, or climbed out the window.”

  “Can I go up?”

  Jessica was lying on the bed listening to music issuing from some portable Ipad speakers. She looked expressionlessly at me.

  “You didn’t get back to me,” I said.

  “I deleted your phone number straight away so they couldn’t trace it. You were stupid to ring me.”

  I sat down on the end of the bed. “I went to see that Social Worker of yours. She’s a right evil cow isn’t she?”

  She brightened up slightly. “Complete bitch,” she agreed. “I hate her!”

  “I can’t get anyone to listen to me, because I haven’t any evidence,” I said bluntly.

  Her face convulsed with hatred again. “You don’t believe me!”

  “I didn’t say that,” I corrected. I had decided to at least act at all times as though I believed her. “I said that no-one else believes us because we have no evidence. Do you have any ideas how we could start proving this? Can you record some interactions on your phone for instance?”

  She shook her head. “They check our phones all the time, and often they take them off us.”

  Typical paranoid delusions? I thought. Everyone out to get her? Everything on her phone being traced and monitored?

  “Can you introduce me to some other girls?” I asked. But of course, if Chetsi was right, they could all be working on a big wind-up together, and co-ordinating what they said.

  She sat motionless for a bit, calculating. Then she pulled up her left sleeve. Her forearm was covered with numerous horrible slash mark scars at various stages of healing, but it wasn’t these she was showing me. She pointed at a discreet pair of small white puckered circles in the crook of her elbow. “See those, that means I’m in Mohammad’s control group, one mark is Kaz’s, three is Hussein’s.”

  My skin crawled at the final name. But for goodness sake, it was like being called ‘Steve’ – really common. “What are they?” I asked.

  “Cigarette burns,” she explained. “Once they’ve properly got hold of you, they mark you. Then they know which group you come from if they come across you somewhere.”

  “So if I come across a girl with one, two or three cigarette burn scars on her inner elbow, I know that they’re being controlled by the gang?” I established thoughtfully.

  She nodded.

  “But you can’t give me any names?”

  “I’ll have to think about
it,” she said, looking at me out of the corner of her eye. “We’d have to know we can trust you, because we’ll pay for it big time if the men find out…”

  Downstairs I said in passing to the mother. “Got nowhere with the Social Worker. Going to try the Herald next.”

  She looked glum. “Malcolm’s already tried that. They weren’t interested.”

  “Can but try!” I said cheerfully. But she’d already shaken my confidence.

  On a day when Rob wasn’t racing and my own event finished early enough, I called round with the car on the way back. It was the only way I could think to do it without Paul noticing. Rob gave it the once over.

  “How old is it?”

  “It’s done one season with Tyler and one and a bit seasons with me.”

  He nodded.

  Then we sat down and talked about lots of small details.

  Jo arrived into the flat in a fluster. “The things I do for you, Eve!” She complained.

  I raised my eyebrows in enquiry.

  “Dad caught me in his office and he looked so amused I just know he knew it had something to do with you! I was stumbling over some stupid excuse and shoving the DVD up my jumper – honestly!”

  She handed me the official DVD of the last ever World Championship he’d won.

  I turned it over in my hands. “Do we have anything that we can play this on?”

  “Oh g-a-a-wd!” Jo groaned.

  Finally it turned out Zanna’s lap top had a DVD function.

  We watched it so many times, Zanna was going spare. Finally she walked over and slammed the lid shut.

  “Did we learn anything from that do you think?” I asked uncertainly.

  Jo looked glum. “Just that he’s good.”

  I put my forehead down on my arms and groaned.

  Jo did the same, only she was saying, “And now I’ve got to somehow get it surreptitiously back into his office,” she moaned. “I hope he doesn’t know the order he lines his DVDs up off by heart!”

  The guy who they called over to speak to me at our local rag was unimpressed. “And you are..?”