Shooting in the Dark

revenge.
    Only the guy didn’t look like that at all. If she’d seen him in any other context, she’d have thought he was a doctor or a teacher. Someone with a profession. It didn’t make sense that a man like that was watching Ralph, the slimeball in her life.
    She wondered, could the guy be a cop? And she gave up the thought almost immediately. The clothes were wrong. Even when they’re working undercover, there’s something about the bearing of a cop that they can’t hide. They get away with it sometimes, but only when they’re working with dopers or criminals who have more brawn than brain.
    So perhaps the guy was a private eye? Employed by someone Ralph had victimized or exploited. Whatever, Janet found it strange to imagine herself as a single link in a chain of surveillance. There was Ralph at the cutting edge, watching the world for anything it might put in his path, then there was the blond guy watching him doing it. And Janet was standing behind them, watching the two of them, watching the blond guy watching Ralph and Ralph obviously not watching his back. She wondered if there might be someone else, Geordie, say, who was watching her in turn. And further back still, another Other? Makes for a creepy feeling down your spine when you start to think like that. Find yourself looking around, scrutinizing the old lady with a shopping trolley, checking out the unshaved youth in the long gabardine.
     
    She thought: the blond guy is some kind of private detective. He’s watching Ralph on behalf of someone else with a grievance. OK, let’s assume that Ralph is on the run from someone or something in his previous life. If that was true, then that’s exactly what she needed as a lever to prise him out of her life. Next time she saw the blond guy she’d go up to him and say, Hi, my name’s Janet. Have you got anything on Ralph that I can use? Just lay it on him like that. See what happened.
    But the next day the blond guy wasn’t around. She kept her eyes skinned for someone else, the blond guy’s replacement or partner, but didn’t find anyone obvious. It was a cold day and Ralph got himself settled in the bar of the Lowther on King’s Staith. Janet had Echo with her, in the pram; she hung around for half an hour and felt her feet go numb and then decided to call it a day and go home.
    His room was a tip. There was a Gustav Klimt poster on the wall, Garden with Sunflowers, which she’d put up the day he arrived, but it was the only bright thing in there. His clothes, shoes, dirty socks and underwear were all mixed together on the floor. Not an inch of carpet showed itself. Janet had put a waste bin in the room but he hadn’t used it. Instead he had three or four plastic carriers filled to the brim and overflowing with cigarette packets, betting slips, racing papers, sweet and chocolate wrappers, old envelopes and bits and pieces of household items that he’d systematically taken apart. The drawers in the chest were almost empty. A pair of jeans in one and a jacket with holes in the elbows in another. The top left drawer was locked and there was no key. There was an alarm clock that Janet had had in her flat, before she met Geordie, but it was now separated into its component parts. Several pens, similarly broken, the casings split apart and abandoned. There were a couple of patterned mugs in there as well, both stuffed with decaying food, apple cores and the remains of a sandwich, might once have been Coronation chicken. The mugs Janet had bought in the market only a fortnight ago. Another two carrier bags contained hardcore porn mags, stuff you couldn’t ignore: a magazine called Cum Shots, and another one which promised Black Hard-fucking Amateur Babes.
    There was nothing else in there. No birth certificate, no National Insurance card, not even a letter from the taxman. There were no personal photographs. The poverty was so overwhelming that Janet sank down on her knees in the entrance to the room. Nobody lived in this room. Mr Nobody.
    She took the two mugs - green-and-yellow abstract design with a chain of daisies on the inside - downstairs and emptied the decaying food into the dustbin. She washed the mugs and left them on the draining board.
    There was a time when Geordie could have gone the same way as Ralph. There was a time when Janet might have taken the same path. She’d even begun on it: regular shoplifting trips and a casual relationship with prostitution. The only thing that made