So which was it to be: Balmoral Castle or Sandringham House? This was the sort of decision she hated. Should she choose Balmoral, with its pine trees and purple mountains, or Sandringham, with that impossibly blue sky?
"Oh, for God's sake! Make up your mind," she snapped silently to herself, but still no decision came. Never mind, perhaps she'd do better with the lightbulbs. She turned to go, turned back again, reaching out her hand, then withdrew it and almost fled into the aisle marked Electrical. Her heart sank when she saw the stacked shelves. A lightbulb was a lightbulb, she'd always thought, so why were there so many different types? She read the labels in mounting panic: sixty watt, forty watt, a hundred watt, and so on. Then some were plain and some were pearl, whatever that meant, and others had screw caps and bayonet caps. She felt like screaming. "I only want a lightbulb. A common or garden lightbulb. Any friggin' one will do." Another woman muscled alongside her, picked up a pack of four sixty watts and moved away. For a moment she thought of asking for help, then realised the stupidity of that and gave an involuntary giggle. How could she possibly have explained what she wanted it for?
A female store detective casually walked round the end of the display and watched her. Only two weeks into the job, but she recognised the type: early twenties; hair pulled back and fixed with a rubber band; spotty complexion from chips with everything but usually by themselves. And wearing a cheap quilted jacket with Michigan emblazoned across the back, even though it was a fine summer's day. Single parent, no doubt, living in one of the project flats after her boyfriend walked out. She'd fill her basket, and perhaps those pockets, with toiletries and hardware here in Wilko's, then walk round to Lidl to buy groceries. Then she'd have to splash what she'd saved by taking a taxi home because she'd never manage everything on the bus. The bus station was half a mile away and the service erratic, whilst there was a queue of taxis right outside the store waiting for fares such as her.
A gaggle of schoolgirls came into the shop and headed for the toiletries, noisy as geese. Wilko's are good at toiletries, often charging half what the more fashionable stores charge for the same branded items. The detective sighed and looked at her watch. There were still three more shops to be visited before she could go home and make the kids' teas. She gave the woman in the Michigan jacket a last look and headed in the direction of the noise.
It was easy, the woman in the Michigan jacket realised. Why hadn't she thought of it before? Choose the cheapest; it was as simple as that. She picked up a bulb — 25p, size and type irrelevant — and placed it in the wire basket she was carrying. What about the tea towels, though? They were the same price, so how would she overcome that hurdle?
She'd choose the nearest. She'd walk round the corner, reach out and pick up the first one. She couldn't remember which it would be, the Balmoral or the Sandringham, but it didn't matter. Tomorrow it would be a long way away, in the landfill site, so it didn't matter at all.
It was Balmoral. She almost changed her mind because she'd seen a programme about Sandringham on TV when it was the Queen's Jubilee, but she summoned what little resolve she possessed and grabbed the Balmoral. At the end of the aisle she checked in the big convex mirror that nobody was following her and stuffed the towel into one of her pockets. At the end of the next aisle she did the same with the lightbulb.
The schoolgirls were taking the tops off bottles and sniffing the contents, alternately pulling faces or expressing approval. She pushed between them, saying: "Excuse me" and felt a pang of regret mixed with jealousy as their perfume assaulted her nostrils. She wanted to warn them, tell them that there was more to life than boyfriends and pop music and the latest fashion, but she knew that she wouldn't have listened and they wouldn't, either. She picked up a bottle of Revlon shampoo — 95p here, Ј2.35 in Boots — and dropped it into her basket. Fifteen minutes later she was on the bus home, with a receipt safely in her pocket saying that at 11:59 she had purchased one item costing Ј0.95.
The flat was on the third floor and she had to rest twice on the way up the stairs. Whoever lived below her was still piling stuffed bin-liners out on the landing, and somebody had peed in the corner. The incessant dum-dum-dum of a drum machine came from the ground floor flat where Heckley's aspiring answer to Bob Marley lived, and the smell of somebody's curry competed unappetisingly with that of stale urine. She leaned out over the wall, took a deep breath of slightly fresher air, and tackled the last flight.
As soon as she opened the door she heard the baby's whimpering. His tears had dried long ago and his crying was reduced to a low keening noise that grated on her nerves like a fingernail across a blackboard. He hesitated for a moment as she loomed over him, but started again almost immediately with renewed energy. She swatted away the flies that were flying and crawling around the carrycot and picked him up.
"It's OK," she said, matter-of-fact, as if talking to an adult. "Mummy's brought something home for you."
The baby wasn't placated. He had a flat face with small eyes, and sweat had pasted his hair to his head. She rested him awkwardly in the crook of her arm until the wetness seeped through and she had to dump him roughly back in his carrycot, her face contorted with disgust. The whimpering escalated to full-blown bawling and she fled from the room, slamming the door behind her.
With the television turned up loud she could hardly hear him. The bin men were due in less than an hour so there was no time to waste. The woman laid the tea towel on the work surface alongside the kitchen sink, the picture of Balmoral surrounded by symmetrical pine trees face down, andjaid the lightbulb on it. She folded the cloth once, covering the bulb, and stooped to bring a pan from a cupboard.
The first blow was half-hearted and the bulb didn't break. The second shattered it and the next one reduced the pieces to smithereens. She carefully unfolded the cloth to inspect her handiwork, the shards of glass that clung to the material sparkling in the dilute sunlight that struggled through the uncurtained window. Some too small, most still too large, she decided. Another two blows and she was satisfied with her handiwork.
The bin men came dead on time, the roar of the lorry's engine announcing its arrival as it emptied the dumpsters and compacted their contents deep within its interior. She stood on the landing, watching, as the evidence of her thieving was engulfed by the collective waste of this end of the housing project. Balmoral Castle and lightbulb were swamped and smothered by waste food, empty cartons, disposable nappies and all the other jetsam of modern society. Cabbage stalks and cereal boxes were mashed and compressed with takeaway trays, rotten fruit, chicken bones and used cat litter. Jam jars and cigarette packets were mixed with ice cream cartons, ketchup bottles and potato peelings in a stinking stew fit for nothing beyond dumping under the earth, out of sight, out of mind. Powerful hydraulics compressed the tea towel between a semen-stained copy of the Littlewood's catalogue and an unwanted hamster cage, but no one would ever know that. No one at all.
The baby was still whimpering, his throat too dry to cry, his narrow eyes too tired for tears. She picked up a plastic spoon and the tin of peach and banana baby food she'd opened earlier and went into the bedroom. He looked at her, wary and confused, lifting his arms as if reaching for her, then dropping them again. She picked him up, sat him on her knee and let him nestle against her breast. When he was comfortable she dipped the spoon into the gooey mix of fruit and brought it out piled high.
'"Ere," she said, touching the mixture against the child's mouth. "Eat this. This'll give you something to cry about."
The baby felt the moist, sweet fruit against his thin lips and liked the taste. He stopped whimpering, opened his mouth wide and gratefully took in the spoon's contents.
When the Earth was still an infant planet its surface was covered by a vast ocean which teemed and boiled with life. A continent arose out of the ocean and the creatures of the sea came out of the water and colonised it. The ocean was called Tethys, and the land was called Gondwanaland.
No, these are not the ramblings of some would-be J.R.R. Tolkein but a rough approximation of modern geological theory, as I remembered it. The sea was alive with a brew of creatures beyond anything that haunted the worst drug-induced nightmare. Primitive planktons and algae competed with and supplied food for life-forms which existed in their billions and have vanished without a trace. Some of them floated on the currents, others developed the means of locomotion. They wriggled and squirmed or flapped protuberances until they moved into more favourable locations, while others squirted about on jets of water. They mated to reproduce, or simply divided, then ate each other and their own young. Many were merely a mouth with a digestive tract hanging behind it, while others were ornate filigrees that hung and hovered in the water, catching the sun that gave life to everything. Some pulsed with luminescence while others had eyes that dwarfed the rest of their bodies. Evolution was practising. Most were in blind alleys, doomed to extinction in a handful of generations, because they were not fast or clever enough, or because they tasted too good. Other's held tenure for aeons, making Man's visitation on the planet appear no more than a footnote.
Some learned how to convert dissolved gasses and minerals into stone, and developed shells for protection, and for a while they held dominion of the sea. But even, these, after a moment or two of life, hardly a blink in geologkal time, sank to the bottom to join the countless billions of their ancestors. The land rose and sank, rose and sank, in cycles measuring millions of years. Gondwanaland was pulled apart by forces exerted by the Moon and Sun, and by the rotation of the Earth, into a group of smaller continents much like the ones that exist today. Sheets of ice scoured these lands, stripping the soil in some places, depositing it on others, and mountain chains bulged upwards as the new continents crushed against each other.
As the climate became more stable Mankind evolved, probably in Africa, and rapidly spread all around the planet. One group, handsomer and more resourceful than the rest, arrived at a place that was as fair as anywhere else they'd seen on their travels. The water was sweet and the climate favourable.
"This'll do," their leader declared.
"What shall we call it?" someone asked.
"Yorkshire," he replied, and so it was.
Ching-ing! Ching-ing! The sound of steel against steel echoed off the far wall of the quarry as Rosie Barraclough attempted to chisel a particularly fine specimen from the limestone wall.
"There!" she declared as it finally broke free. "Who can tell me what these are?"
She handed the splinter of rock to Geoff, who shrugged his shoulders and passed it to me. It was a cluster of crinoids, but I handed it on without saying so. There were six of us in the group, including Rosie, and we all wore yellow helmets and plastic safety glasses. When I read the brochure for evening classes at Heckley High School that plopped on to my doormat, I'd been torn between Geology and Spanish for Beginners. Geology because I was interested and I like to know what I'm looking at when I tramp over the moors and dales; Spanish because it might be useful. I'd decided on Spanish as I walked into the school hall on enrolment night, because I was determined to do more travelling and the learning effort required might keep my brain cells from ossifying. But then I saw Rosie.
She was sitting all alone behind a desk with a label on it that said Practical Geology. I cast a glance at the queue waiting to sign up for Spanish, decided that holidaymakers ought to boycott any country that encourages the ritual torture of animals, and veered towards Geology. Whether it was a wise move or something I'd regret for the rest of my life is open to debate.
"Charlie," I heard her say.
"What, Miss?"
"Any ideas what this is, or have I been wasting my time?"
"It's a fossil."
"Ye-es. But of what?"
I went off dolly birds a long time ago. Rosie was not too many years younger than me and had grey hair, with silver streaks. But it belonged grey. I couldn't imagine it any other colour. Her face was strong and mobile, with a mischievous grin constantly playing around her eyes, and she looked great in jeans.
"Um, an ammonite."
"No, Charlie. You're about 200 million years too late."
"Story of my life."
"Anybody else?"
"Are they crinoids?" Miss Eakins ventured, and as she looked down at the specimen her hard hat fell forward and dislodged the spectacles, as it had done several times before. There are two Miss Eakins in the class, each a mirror image of the other. Identical glasses, identical anoraks and boots, identical hairstyles. Well, style is hardly the word. Frizzy mess is more like it. They did everything together, as far as we could tell, even to the point of speaking in unison. Asking: "Are they crinoids?" was a great departure from the norm for one of them, a blow for individuality. The other Miss Eakin looked horrified.
"Well done," said Rosie,
The other two members of the class were men. Geoff was a retired building society manager and Tom still worked at something in engineering, he said. Like me, they both enjoyed walking and wanted to know more about what was underfoot. I think the two Miss Eakins only joined because it was an 'ology. There were twelve of us in the class at the beginning of term, but a succession of rainy Wednesdays had washed out most of the fieldwork, so Rosie had gallantly taught theory in the classroom. I didn't mind, still found it interesting, but numbers had dwindled. I'd have been happy if they'd all stayed away. This was the last class of the summer term, and our only foray out into limestone country, to Bethesda quarry, on the southern boundary of the Yorkshire Dales. It was a long way from Heckley, but geology is all about fossils to the amateur, so we'd met an hour earlier than usual and gone looking for them at the bottom of the quarry, beneath the sandstone. And there was a link with the town, Rosie told us: the stone for Heckley Methodist chapel had been donated by the owner of Bethesda quarry.
It was also the last chance I'd have to invite her for a drink.
"Are there any dinosaur bones in here?" Tom asked. If all engineers are like Tom I'm not surprised the industry collapsed.
"No, Tom," Rosie replied without a hint of impatience or dismay. "Down here we are in the Palaeozoic era. The dinosaurs didn't appear until the Triassic period, which would be up there somewhere if it hadn't been eroded away." She waved a hand, still holding the chisel, towards the lip of the quarry.
The worst scenario was that I suggest we all go to the pub for an end-of-term snifter, but it wasn't necessary. As the class started back up the track to where the cars were parked I hung behind, looking for a suitable ledge where I could leave the fossilised crinoids. It wasn't such a fine specimen to be worth keeping, but a future class might appreciate it. I place it in a niche in the rock wall and sauntered after the others.
Rosie was standing by the boot of her car, collecting our hard hats and spectacles. I placed mine in the box and laid her fill geologist's hammer, which I'd been carrying, alongside them. None of the others were in earshot, so I said: "Thanks for that, Rosie. It was really interesting and I've enjoyed the course. Do you fancy going for a drink?"
She picked up the hammer, made a knocking motion towards me a couple of times, then said: "An ammonite!"
"Ammonites, crinoids, I was close."
"Only in the dictionary."
"That drink?"
I think she was blushing slightly as she said: "Yes, that's a good idea."
I'd brought Geoff and Tom to the quarry, and Rosie had given a lift to the Misses Eakins. We dropped them off in the school car park, said our goodnights and I helped Rosie carry her stuff back into the geology lab. It was almost dark and the school caretaker was waiting for us, jangling his keys. Ten minutes later Rosie and I were seated in the pub sipping gin and tonics. There's something irresistible about a g and t. I'd gone to the bar feeling quite content and at peace with the world, prepared to order a half of lager for myself, but as soon as Rosie asked for a gin and tonic my salivary glands burst into life and I heard myself say: "That sounds nice. I think I'll join you."
"So what made you become a geology teacher?" I asked, after that first satisfying sip.
"Ooh, that's just what the doctor ordered," she said, lowering her glass and pulling an approving face.
"You must have a different doctor to me."
"I believe in self-medication. Why did I become a geology teacher?"
"Mmm."
"I didn't. I became a geography teacher. Geog's my first subject. Ask me about the rainfall in Namibia, or the climatic factors affecting the rise of the wine industry in Southern Australia."
"None, and it's warm and sunny."
"Well done."
"So how did the geology creep in?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "I needed a second subject, and there's a growing interest in it. It's always held a fascination for me, since I was a little girl. When the other kids received a doll for Christmas, I got a magnifying glass. My dad used to take me and my brother walking along the beach and we'd collect stones and bring them home. Afterwards we'd try to identify them from pictures in books. I suppose that's where it started, although by the same process I could have become an ornithologist or a biologist, meteorologist, just about anything. Dad was a polymath, in his own quiet way, and encouraged us to be the same."
"What did your brother become?"
Rosie lifted her heavy glass and studied the liquid in it, with its characteristic bloom. "A sailor. He ran away to sea when he was sixteen."
"Ran away?"
"He joined the Merchant Navy, I've never seen him since."
"Your dad sounds a bit like mine," I told her. "He was interested in everything, taught me to ask questions, never to be afraid of making a fool of myself. 'There's always someone wanting to know the same thing but daren't ask,' he used to tell me. Was your dad a teacher, too?"
Rosie gave a tiny involuntary jump, coming back from wherever she'd drifted off to, and smiled as she said: "No, he was a baker. We owned a bakery in South Wales, near a village called Laugharne. Mum was a great fan of Dylan Thomas, who had lived there for a while. That's how we came to know the place."
"So you're Welsh. You don't have the accent."
"No, I'm English. We originated in Gloucestershire and moved to Wales when I was three. And that part of Wales used to be known as Little England. Then… afterwards… we moved to East Anglia. Cromer and a couple of other places."
Afterwards, she'd said, with some emphasis, but I decided not to pry. I wanted to see her again, not learn her life-story. I decided to stay on safe ground. "So it was fresh bread every morning," I stated. "My mouth is watering at the thought of it."
"It was wonderful. We lived over the bakery and awoke to the smell. Dad started work at three in the morning but he'd be finished by noon, so he was always there to meet us from school and that's when we'd go walking on the beach. We looked for fossils and collected various shells and pebbles. He taught me how to identify minerals by doing scratch and hardness tests. Things like that."
I felt envious, and my stomach reminded me that I'd had a canteen pie for lunch and a bowl of cornflakes before I dashed out to the class. OK, so it was a large bowl, and I'd had a sliced banana with honey on the flakes, but I'm a big lad.
"It sounds idyllic," I told her. "So what brought you to Yorkshire?"
"It was, but it couldn't last. Dad… he died, and Mum started to follow the same route as her hero, Dylan Thomas. She hit the bottle. We went from warm, loving, nuclear family to totally dysfunctional in less than three months. I scraped into university and married a fellow student who turned out to be a total waster. Took me twelve years to realise it, unfortunately. I walked out on him and headed north, in search of no-nonsense, northern straightforwardness and hospitality."
"Ha! And did you find it?"
"I'm not sure."
"I'm sorry about the family. I take it you have no children?"
"No. Have you any?"
I looked straight at her, face composed, as I replied: "I imagine so," but I couldn't maintain the look and broke into a grin. "No, no children," I admitted.
"And is there a Mrs Charlie Priest, as in Roman Catholic?"
"That's my line."
"I know. That's what you told me when I asked you your name at enrolment."
"You remembered. I'm flattered." I held her gaze and saw that hint of a blush again. "No, there is no Mrs Priest. Same story as you, except she walked out on me, left me holding the J-cloth."
"She found herself a rich boyfriend," I added, in an attempt to clear myself of any responsibility for the break-up.
"Same again?"
"I'll get them," I said, reaching for my wallet.
"No, it's my turn. G and t?"
"No, just an orange juice, please, with lemonade."
I watched her go to the bar and decided that there was something I liked about Rosie Barraclough, and it wasn't just those slim hips and that handsome face. There was a strange mix of vulnerability and strength in her character, a joy that hid a deep sadness, and I knew for certain that I wanted to play a part in trying to ease that sadness. I never dreamed how wrong I could be; how I would make it a million times worse.
"So what about you, Charlie?" she said as she placed my drink in front of me. "You've learned my life-story, now it's your turn."
When you are a cop, a detective, you learn techniques for getting people to open up and confide in you. You learn all there is about them without giving away a single thing about yourself. Sometimes it's like opening a bottle of ketchup: nothing comes out for a while and then suddenly you're covered in it. In the police station, on the job, that's good, but you find yourself doing it in your private life, too, and that's not good. I had nothing to hide from Rosie, nothing at all, but I don't like talking about myself. If you keep quiet, people give you the benefit of the doubt. Why open your mouth and prove them wrong?
"There's not much to say," I told her. "I've lived in Heckley all my life, went to Heckley Grammar School where I was captain of the football team, then art college, one marriage, met Rosie Barraclough whilst studying geology. I do quite a lot of walking, occasionally paint a large abstract when I'm feeling fraught, and like to do all the normal things that you see in the personal ads. I've a GSH and WLTM an NS for an LTR, or something."
Rosie eyes crinkled as she smiled at me. "Have you ever advertised?"
"No, honest. Have you?"
"I've never been so desperate. I suppose some people are trapped by their circumstances and that's their only chance to meet people."
"I suppose so." I was going to add that night classes were a better way, but decided not to. We talked about our families for a while and I learned that Rosie's mother was still alive, in a nursing home in East Anglia.
"Another?" I asked, pointing at her empty glass, but she shook her head and said she ought to be off. As we walked across the car park I told her that I'd like to see her again. Rosie said she'd look forward to that and we agreed to meet on Saturday night. When you are single it's the weekend evenings that are most difficult to fill. She wrote her phone number on a pay-and-display ticket for me and I put it in a safe place.
"Drink, Chinese, curry, pictures, theatre?" I said. "If we want to go to the theatre I'll have to get the tickets." We were standing alongside her car as she held the driver's door open, and a light drizzle had started to fall.
"Not the cinema or the theatre," she replied. "Let's go where we can talk."
"Chinese and a drink?"
"Lovely, and perhaps then I'll learn a little bit more about the enigmatic Charlie Priest."
"I'm afraid there's no more to tell. I'm a very shallow person."
"That I don't believe. I'm still worried about that ammonite."
"The ammonite?"
"The crinoids. You knew perfectly well what they were, so why did you call them an ammonite? Was it to encourage Miss Eakin, which would be kind of you, or was it because you're a control freak, laughing at everybody from behind your sleeve?"
"Damn, you've rumbled me. It was because I was trying to win the heart of Miss Eakin. Either one. "[he pair of them would have been beyond my wildest fantasy."
"I'll believe you. And you can tell me all about the secret art of the graphic designer. It's a mystery to me what they do."
"A graphic designer? Who said I was a graphic designer?"
"You did, the first night. We were admiring the drawing you did of a trilobite and Tom asked you what you did for a living. I thought you said you were a graphic designer."
"Ah! No. I'm sorry. I didn't think you'd heard that. It's just a defence mechanism. If I say what I really do people start asking me all sorts of questions, telling me their problems, laying down the law as they see it. It's a lot easier to tell a fib. I always say I'm a graphic designer and that usually silences them."
"So what do you do?"
"I'm a policeman. A detective. I'm sorry if I misled you, it wasn't intentional. You're getting soaked."
I'm not sure if it was the lie or the fact that I was a cop that dismayed Rosie, but something did. Her eyes narrowed and the smile left them. "Oh," was all she said.
"It's an honourable profession." I'd lined myself up to lean forward and give her a peck on the cheek as we said our good-nights, but I didn't get the chance. Rosie slipped into the driver's seat and I said: "I'll ring you."
"Yes," she replied as she pulled the door shut. I gave her a wave and walked over to where my own car was parked. She was embarrassed about being misled, I decided. When I'd plied her with one of Mr Ho's special banquets and her fingers were wrapped around another gin and tonic she'd want to know all about my best cases, of that I was sure. Women always do.