Waiting for Wednesday

boy and girl. He held their smiles in his mind for later. They ate ice creams and
went to lunch at a Pizza Express. Everywhere he looked, he seemed to see single fathers.
He had made mistakes, he had always put work first, thinking he had no choice, and he
had missed the bedtime rituals and the morningchaos. There had often
been several days in a row when he hadn’t seen his children at all, out before
they woke and home after they slept, and had once flown home from holiday early. He had
let his wife take up the slack and he hadn’t understood the consequences until it
was far too late, and there was no way back. Was this the price he had to pay?
    They played a board game that he made sure
he lost and he showed them a very simple magic trick he’d learned with cards, and
they shouted at him as if he was a wizard. Then he put on a video and the three of them
sat on the sofa together, him in the middle, warm and full of sadness.
    When the phone rang, he ignored it and at
last it stopped. Then it rang again. Mikey and Bella looked at him expectantly and moved
away, so he reluctantly stood up, went over to it and picked it up from its holster.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘It’s Yvette.’
    ‘It’s Sunday.’
    ‘I know, but …’
    ‘I’m with my kids.’ He
hadn’t told her they were leaving. He didn’t want anyone at work to know and
pity him. They’d start inviting him out for drinks after work, stop thinking of
him as the boss and think of him as a poor sap instead.
    ‘Yes.’ She sounded flustered.
‘I just wanted to keep you in the loop. You told me I should.’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘Ruth Lennox went somewhere before she
went home: a flat near Elephant and Castle. We’ve managed to trace the landlord;
he was away so it took a bit of time. He seemed relieved to find that we were only
contacting him about a murder,’ she added drily. ‘He confirmed that the flat
was rented to a Mr Paul Kerrigan, a building surveyor.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘I talked to Mr Kerrigan. And
there’s something up. I don’t know what. He didn’t want to talk over
the phone. We’re meeting him tomorrow morning.’
    There was a silence. Yvette waited, then
said forlornly: ‘I thought you’d like to know.’
    ‘What time?’
    ‘Half past eight, at the building site
he’s currently working on. The Crossrail development, down on Tottenham Court
Road.’
    ‘I’ll be there.’
    ‘Do you think –’
    ‘I said I’ll be
there.’
    Karlsson put the phone back in its holster,
already regretting his sharpness. It wasn’t Yvette’s fault.
    Later, after Mikey and Bella had been
collected by their mother and he’d gone for a run, he paced the garden with one of
his illicit cigarettes. Birds were singing in the dusk, but that just made him feel
sourer and more defeated. He went indoors and picked up the phone, then sat on the sofa
where his children had been just a couple of hours previously. He held the phone and
stared at it as if it could tell him something. At last, before he could change his
mind, he called Frieda’s number. He had to talk to someone and she was the only
person he could bear to unburden himself to. The phone rang and rang; he could almost
hear it echoing in her tidy, empty house. She wasn’t there. He called her mobile,
although he knew that she almost never turned it on or even listened to messages left
there – sure enough, it went straight to voicemail.
    He closed his tired, sore eyes and waited
for the feeling to recede. The thought of work was a relief from the thought of
life.
    ‘What was it like?’ said Sasha,
later that evening.
    ‘When I got out of the tube,’
said Frieda, ‘on the way back from the airport, it was quite strange. For just a
moment, London seemed different. It looked grubby and stunted and quite poor. It was
like moving to the third world.’
    ‘I was really asking you about New
York.’
    ‘You’ve seen the movies,’
said Frieda. ‘You’ve probably been there several times. You know what
it’s like.’
    ‘When I was asking you about New York,
I was really asking you about Sandy.’
    ‘He thinks I should move there,’
said Frieda. ‘He says I should be somewhere that’s less
dangerous.’
    ‘And be with him.’
    ‘Yes. That too.’
    ‘Are you tempted?’
    ‘I said no before,’ said Frieda.
‘Now – I don’t know. I miss him. But I’ve got things to do here.
Things that need finishing. Now, when am I going to meet this new man of
yours?’
Frieda, my dearest heart, it all