Pain of Death by Adam Creed

Give me a call. And, oh … I’m looking for a job for someone I know. He’s pretty desperate, just something menial. It doesn’t matter, really, just to keep him occupied. Better if it didn’t involve a police check. He’s a good lad. Love to Flick and let’s hook up some time.’ He blows out his cheeks, trousers his phone and gets a raise of the eyebrows from Alicia Flint who is pulling out another pair of Amstels from her fridge.
    *
    The light flicks off and her heart hurdles a beat. After hour upon hour of nothing happening, just the slow arc of the sun and the pale fading of the weather against the Welsh hills, Zoe is nervous of change. The man and the woman who come, in masquerade masks and black raincoats, keep telling her she need not worry. They asked her about the baby and gave her a vitamin supplement. It will be soon, she thinks. It feels soon; sooner than the dates she gave the doctor. The last baby was too soon: too small, too weak.
    She closes her book in the dark. She has been reading it slowly and deliberately, so as not to be without it. She has tried to get inside the mind of Toni Morrison, to distinguish her from the narrator. The task stretches the book and exercises her mind, something she has learned to do in private.
    Zoe undresses and slides between the sheets on the mattress which she has moved to beneath the window. Last night the moon was unobscured. Not so tonight. The shapes within the room emerge slowly from the dark as her eyes adjust.
    She passes her hand across her belly in slow circles. The baby hasn’t kicked since after lunch. She wishes it would. She closes her eyes, remembers the look on the doctor’s face as they agreed upon a termination. The woman was insisting on a final scan, but there was no smear of emotion, no hint of the right and wrong of it.
    And before she finds sleep, in those bulrushes between the conscious and the not, Zoe wonders whether, if this one dies, it will find its brother. And she dreams that when she wakes, she is crying. She begins to dream that she is between the leaves of a book, listening to this stupid woman cry.
     

Twelve

    A sea fret comes up from Albert Dock and drifts around the sandstone monolith of Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral which broods high above cobbled Huskisson Street. Below, the city slopes away from Staffe. Above the seam of mist, he can see the sun glint on the hills, which must be Wales.
    Staffe has stopped by the entrance to a bail hostel – fashioned within a grand neo-classical house. He looks behind him, up to the beautiful, stately Falkner Square where the brass is already out, tricking, or buying their daily dose. Boys in black track suits and black trainers skulk with their hoods drawn up. Somewhere, a peal of laughter smooths through the mist. It is the sound of students. He checks the address he jotted down from the stamp in Zoe’s books, and carries on.
    Before long, he sees the large Chinese arch and carries on past, down Duke Street. There are more junkies in these streets, just one block off the main drag, and even though it isn’t yet ten o’clock in the morning, they are carrying cans of super-strength lager as if they were styrofoams of coffee.
    The Curious Cat is no ordinary bookshop. Tucked away between a done-up boozer and a fancy Japanese restaurant, it is in a double-fronted, rickety Victorian building that opens out into a small bazaar. The sandwich board at the entrance to the indoor market tells you these are shops for the socially aware, funding the victims of government crime. It says, ‘IF YOU CARE, SHOP HERE’. Above the entrance, on a cracked plastic banner, in red letters: ‘ALL PROCEEDS TO THE VICTIMS OF GOVERNMENT CRIME’.
    The Curious Cat is opposite a tattoo parlour called Free Ink. Behind its counter, chewing on an unlit roll-up and reading the Guardian , is a dreadlocked woman aged thirty, or thereabouts. She smells of cat and Staffe wonders if this could be deliberate.
    She looks up