fish and chips. IP

Nina didn’t notice, but when she did she couldn’t help not noticing the way Jeff always seemed to be talking about Meena. He was looking out the kitchen window at the cooing pigeons that sometimes came down to the bird table in the garden.

‘You’ll never guess what Meena did…’

‘You’ll never guess what Meena said...’

‘It was unbelievable the way Meena handled Mrs Smartyknicker today…’

Mrs Smartyknickers was their pet name for the playgroup leader that Jeff took their son Logan to. Meena’s son Chander quickly became Logan’s best friend at Aqualind Nursery. Jeff recounted something Meena told him, which he thought hilarous.

‘Tell me?’ A part of Nina wanted it to be funny. She grinned at Jeff to encourage him.

‘What’s the difference between…’ He turned towards her his face shining with the light from bay window and droned on, clutching his arms and giggling as he told her.

Nina just didn’t get it. She laughed a few seconds after he’d finished, because it was easier to than not laughing.

He shook his head and that puzzled expression furrowed his forehead. In the first year of their marriage she’d found that trait so endearing. He flung himself down on a wooden chair at the matching walnut dining room table and looked up at her, and leaned backwards, nestling his head against her chest. She smelt fag smoke, even though he said he’d given up. Nina stepped from behind him, noticing a silver hair in his head and straightened his tie. Her long lacquered nails with the lightest touch of salmon pink brushed a small piece of lint from the crushed blue Velvet jacket. Even sitting down, his grey cords ratcheted up around his ribs. Fidgety- thin, always on the move, the perfect couple: Laurel and Hardy, she thought, and gulped down her distaste.

It was her idea to go out to dinner with Meena and her husband. For over a week she pushed and pulled and harried.

He’d been against the idea. ‘They couldn’t leave Logan…Baby sitters were too expensive and he hadn’t been working for a while…Maybe Meena wouldn’t want to.’

‘Why don’t you ask her?’ Nina hated fuss. She was quiet and efficient. In her job those assets had helped and hindered her.

Jeff bit at his bottom lip, his face chewed on shadows, before he agreed to ask her the following day. ‘She won’t go…she’s…you know?’ and he got that stupid look again.

Nina went to the toilet for the umpteenth time before they left. Logan was at her mum’s. She splashed cold water on her face and squirted a little Chanel on her wrists, rubbing them gently together like dry sticks and looked in the mirror. A fug of blusher looked back at her and her eyes were all wrong, Panda eyes. Her nylon make up bag squatted on top of the cistern. She could start again, take off the blusher, fix her makeup, fix herself, if she’d a few minutes, a few hours, another lifetime. The taxi’s horn hooted.
‘You in there?’ Jeff’s knuckles rapped on the door. ‘C’mon,’ he pleaded, ‘Meena hates people that are always late.’

The taxi dropped them outside Fellini’s, a converted church they used to go to on special occasions. Jeff dropped a step behind her as they went through the glass double doors. He stood at her elbow as they entered the reception area, his jacket brushing against potted ferns. Soft panpipe music played. Another set of steps led down to the bar.

Meena was easy to pick out. Her hair stretched over the lime- green shoulders of her trouser suit and down her back with that black brilliantine glow of a spark of electricity. Her dark eyes turned to meet hers, softening when her gaze shifted to Jeff hiding behind Nina. Her nose was too big, but in nature’s cruel way, thought Nina, that imperfection which in her twenties would have made her passably ugly, in her thirties made her striking and even more attractive. She wore red boots with heels so high each step would be a moonwalk. Cruellest of all she was thin as a malnourished child of ten.

Jeff half raised his hand, almost knocking Nina off the last step in his haste to greet Meena. But she wasn’t alone. A tall balding man in grey pinstripe with flared trousers that seemed a bit too young for him was arguing with Alfonso. As Nina got closer he heard him saying to the manager: ‘It’s racist. I should know because I’ve took on her Paki son.’ He nodded towards Meena, shifting his feet to support his bulk, because he’d little or no neck. ‘And I treat him like my very own.’

‘We’re fully booked.’ Alfonso shrugged, his eyes darting away. ‘If you’d phoned earlier and booked.' He put the accent on booked, but looked bored. 'There wouldn’t have been a problem. We’ve a coach party due and we’re hosting a pre-wedding wedding dinner.’

Alfonso looked down his thin nose and past the man standing in front of him and another elderly couple standing close by, near what would have been the a pillar of the nave, patiently waiting to be seated. Alfonso ghosted past them. He smiled at Nina and took her hand, holding it up to his lips and kissing the back of her hand. ‘Detective Nichol, if I knew they were with you I’d have cooked the meal myself. Gratis, of course. Gratis!’ His long chin tilted upwards, dark eyes pleading and his hands were cupped in supplication. He grasped her fingers, pulling her away from the others and in close to the mahogany edge of the long bar. ‘Come. Come. I’ll find you a table myself even if I have to chop down a tree and make tables and chairs. Nothing is too much for you my friend.’

Nina smiled her baby-blue eyes crinkling with pleasure. Alfonso was such a bullshitter, but such good company. She’d helped him with a small-time gangster, Terry Ross, who’d caused him big-time troubles.

‘Let me take your coat.’ Alfonso tapped the elbow of her long black leather coat and snapped his fingers at a pretty red haired waitress. ‘Take the lady’s coat,’ he ordered, scowling at her so severely the waitress almost tripped on the hardwood flooring over her own feet and spilled the tray of drinks she was carrying.

‘No. No. We’ll just go to the bar and get a drink, while you get set up.’ Nina motioned for Jeff to follow her lead. She was hoping Meena and her partner would do likewise.

‘Hing on.’ Meena’s partner turned and brushed against Nina, confronting Alfonso.

You didn’t need to be a cop to recognise the tone and Nina shut her eyes for a millisecond and tapped her heals together but it didn’t work. Nina’s partner was at the finger pointing stage and when he got to the take your fancy-dan restaurant and shove it stage Nina thought she’d really need to step in. Alfonso standing on his handmade black pointed tip-toes, straining and swaying from side to side, drunk with not yet having his say and for whom one word was the breach in his mouth from which the spittle-flecked darts of a thousand words were sure to follow also needed watching. Nina didn’t want to spoil what had been so far a crappy night by handcuffing both of them, not least because she’d left her handcuffs at the station. The prim little smiles and the way Jeff and Meena exchanged knowing glances made Nina reconsider and wish she’d brought her truncheon. The worst part for Nina was the doe-eyed looks were those of innocents, before a car wreck.

‘We’re leaving.’ Meena’s partner’s prognathous chin brooked no argument. He looked neither right or left and grabbed at Meena’s wrist, pulling her forward in a bucking motion, with the stiletto heels stabbing into the floor as she regained her balance to the background recording of castanets and a dull drum beat.