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Epub ISBN: 9781448136384
Version 1.0
Published by William Heinemann 2015
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Copyright © John Niven, 2015
John Niven has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by William Heinemann
William Heinemann
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www.randomhouse.co.uk
William Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780434023189
Music from Big Pink
Kill Your Friends
The Amateurs
The Second Coming
Cold Hands
Straight White Male
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by John Niven
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty-One
Chapter Eighty-Two
Epilogue: Three Years Later
Copyright
To Sheila Sheerin
SO MUCH BLOOD, Susan Frobisher thought. So much blood.
She was at the kitchen counter, absolutely covered in the stuff. It was spattered all over the worktops, her apron and her face. A huge bowlful of it stood in front of her. The horror-show aspect of the scene was hugely magnified by her kitchen’s whiteness. Traditional Shaker. They’d only had it done last year. All the gadgets: sliding chiller drawer at knee height, waste-disposal unit, one of those bendy taps like you saw on the cooking shows and even a built-in wine cooler. Not that she and Barry drank very much these days, but still, it looked nice, all those frosted bottles lined up like missiles in the bomb bay. (Emperor Kitchens on the Havering Road had done it. Barry had negotiated a very good deal, as always. He loved doing it. Negotiating.) Susan checked her reflection in the smoked-glass door of the cooler and, blood aside, was pleased with what she found as she approached her sixtieth year: her complexion was still youthful, her eyes clear and her figure trim. Her hair had been grey for nearly a decade now, however, and Julie was always on at her to have it done, although the days when it would have been Julie’s ‘treat’ were now long past …
Outside, through the double glazing, the dew was already lifting from the half of the garden the sun was hitting. The first week of May and, finally, spring had properly arrived down here in Dorset. Susan stuck her pinkie into the bowl of blood and put it in her mouth. Mmmm. Not quite sure about the texture. It had to be just right.
If you get it just right, as her great hero the special-effects wizard Tom Savini said, ‘You can create illusions of reality – make people think they’ve seen things they really haven’t seen.’ Horror movies were Susan’s private little vice. (Barry couldn’t stand them, couldn’t stand movies of any kind in fact. ‘Load of rubbish,’ he’d sneer. ‘Somebody just made it all up!’ He liked documentaries. War stuff.) She’d seen everything Savini had ever done – Friday the 13th, The Burning, Dawn of the Dead. She’d watch them curled up with her tea when Barry was working late.
As if on cue Barry Frobisher walked into the kitchen, knotting his tie. He surveyed the scene and said: ‘What the bloody hell …’
‘Not quite the right consistency,’ Susan said. ‘Too thin.’
‘Look at the mess!’
‘I’ve got to get it done now. I’ve the shopping to do and then Julie’s birthday lunch this afternoon, then dress rehearsals tonight.’
‘Christ. Can’t you just … buy this bloody stuff, Susan?’
‘No budget, darling.’
Barry sighed as he moved towards the coffee pot, his partially tied tie still loose around his neck, picking up a cup from the kitchen table as he went. (They always laid the kitchen table for breakfast the night before, before they went to bed.) ‘I don’t know what you get out of this, Susan, I really don’t.’
He took a slice of cold toast from the rack and started buttering it thickly. He’d have been better off with some cereal, Susan thought, that waistline of his, really starting to crawl over the band of his trousers. A 42-inch waist she’d had to buy him, the last time they went clothes shopping in M&S. Not to mention what it was probably doing to his arteries. Susan heard him wheezing a bit in the mornings these days, just with the effort of levering himself out of bed. (His bed. They’d finally gone down that road a few years back: his and hers single beds on either side of the room. They both liked different mattresses anyway. Better to get a good night’s sleep. And, as Barry pointed out, his back was bad and it’s not like they were newly-weds. That side of things happened only very occasionally these days. In fact, when was the last time? Susan strained to remember. Around Christmas? Maybe before.)
‘It’s fun,’ Susan said, answering his question.
Barry snorted.
Wroxham Players – Susan’s ‘creative outlet’.
She was no actor. (Not that many of them were.) She’d started out helping with wardrobe and had now been in charge of Costumes and Props for the past three years. Jesus, Barry thought, the first nights he’d been obliged to attend. Bunch of pensioners and starry-eyed teenagers stepping into the scenery and over each other’s lines. Still, it was harmless enough, he supposed. Kept her off the streets and all that. He poured himself some coffee while, in the background, Susan added more corn syrup to the fake-blood mixture. ‘What is it this year?’ Barry asked over his shoulder.
‘King Lear.’
He thought for a moment. ‘That’s … Shakespeare?’
‘Yes,’ Susan said. Not a reader, her Barry. A good provider. An accountant. A chartered accountant, Susan used to hear herself saying proudly.
‘What’s it about then? That one,’ he asked, sipping his black coffee.
‘Oh, the indignity of old age you could say,’ Susan said, stirring the mixture, wondering if there would be enough of it. She feared Frank, the director, was intending to go a little Peckinpah in the eye-gouging scene. She wondered if the sensibilities of the average Wroxham audience could take it.
‘Sounds cheery,’ Barry said, opening the Daily Mail over at the table, already only half listening. Look at this – bloody East Europeans. All over the place.
Old age.
They’d both be sixty this year. Their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. What was that? Susan wondered. Jade? Topaz or something? And was it really ten years since their silver wedding? Such a lovely little party Tom and Clare had thrown for them, in the function suite down at the Watermill. Not that they saw much of Tom and Clare. Both caught up with their careers. At that age now, early 30s. Still, Susan did find it odd that their son and his wife had been together over a decade now and still hadn’t produced a grandchild. It seemed to be the way these days. She’d been nearly thirty when she had Tom, back in 1983. They’d classified her as an ‘old mum’. Special attention. Nowadays thirty seemed young to be having children. What was Clare now? Thirty-two? Thirty-three? Anyway – they wanted to be getting a move on in Susan’s view.
She gave the water/corn syrup/ketchup mixture a final stir, pleased with the consistency now, and started looking in the drawer beneath the sink for the plastic ziplock freezer bags.
How best to ask him? Susan was wondering.
Tricky ground. Julie and Barry had never enjoyed good terms. Julie, Susan suspected, thought Barry was boring. Barry, she very much knew, thought Julie was completely mental. A bad influence. True, Julie had always been wilder than Susan, way wilder back in the day, but she wasn’t crazy. Still, she’d had a hell of a life, Julie. Maybe play to Barry’s sense of superiority. ‘Oh, darling?’
‘Mmm?’ Eight hundred quid a week in benefits? Shiftless bastards.
‘Could you put an extra three hundred into my account please?’
‘Eh? What for?’
‘Well, I spent a little more than I meant to on Julie’s birthday present.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Susan –’
‘It’s her sixtieth, Barry! And she’s had a terrible time of it these last few years. Losing her business. That bugger running off with all her money. That flat she’s in. That awful job. I wanted to get her something nice.’
‘Well, you know what I think.’
‘I know, but –’
‘One thing after another. That stupid hamburger van. That “boutique”. Woman couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.’
‘She’s been unlucky.’
‘You have to learn to budget, Susan.’
‘I do!’
‘Every other month it’s a couple of hundred for this, a hundred for that.’ He was getting up now. Placing his coffee cup in the sink, finishing the knot in his pink tie, a neat full Windsor.
‘Please, Barry. Don’t be mean.’
‘I’ll transfer the money, OK? But that’s it till next month.’ Another bank transfer to do today too, Barry boy, rather bigger, from the shell account in Holland …
‘Thank you, darling.’
‘I don’t bloody know …’
It had always worked this way, their finances. Barry took care of everything. (Susan had worked, briefly, back in the mid-1970s, in the art gallery in Poole, in the brief window between finishing her fine art degree and marrying Barry. When had she left the gallery? Yes, 1977. Julie had turned up unexpectedly, back from her travels, all her hair shorn off and rows of safety pins running up her lapels. The gallery owner had nearly thrown a fit – Barry too when he met them later that night. Later still they’d gone back to her and Barry’s flat where Julie had made fun of them for listening to Fleetwood Mac on Barry’s reel-to-reel tape machine. State of the art that was at the time. Whatever happened to it? The stuff you have over the years, where does it all go?) Susan only noticed money when her ‘allowance’ account ran low. Barry loved money. Moving it about. Doing this and that. ‘Restructuring’ their finances. Always on the lookout for a sweeter credit card deal, a better interest rate for their savings.
‘Right, I’m off,’ Barry was saying, pushing himself up from the kitchen table with a reluctant grunt.
‘OK, darling. There’s cottage pie in the fridge for your dinner. You can do yourself some peas, can’t you?’
‘I guess I’ll have to. I might work late though …’ He moved to kiss her cheek, then surveyed the mess and thought better of it. He blew one across the counter and Susan smacked her lips back.
‘Good luck, Susan,’ Susan said as he walked towards the door.
‘Eh?’ Barry said, turning back.
‘Good luck with your dress rehearsal tonight, Susan.’
‘Oh, right. Yes, yes, good luck.’
Well, thank you, Susan thought as he left.
Barry, in his turn, thinking, What a load of old bloody bollocks.
WHILE SUSAN WRESTLED with the problems of blood, her oldest friend was dealing with bodily fluids of a different stripe. The thing about piss, Julie Wickham was increasingly coming to believe, was that it was like snowflakes or fingerprints; no two examples were exactly the same.
Take Mrs Meecham at the end of the hall. Hers was always extremely acrid. Sharp. Old Mr Bledlow, Alf here, not so much. Mild, almost scentless. Why? They both had much the same diet, the same three meals a day doled out by the home, tipped out of huge, ultra-cheap plastic catering bags and then boiled or baked or fried. Maybe it had something to do with the kidneys, with their varying degrees of decrepitude. Yet Mr Bledlow was nearly ninety, sitting quietly in the corner over there in the clean pyjamas the nurse had helped him into while Julie worked her mop all around and under his stripped bed, where the overspill had gone. By God it had been a fair old load. Julie dunked the mop into the bleach/water mixture, rinsed it out by pressing it into the colander bit of the metal bucket, and started swabbing again. She caught her face reflected in the shining linoleum, still pretty in the right light, her black hair hanging down, very little grey for her age, and thought to herself, as she had nearly every day in here for the past three months, ‘Forty hours thirty-six dollars a week – But it’s a paycheck, Jack.’
‘Piss Factory’ by Patti Smith. She’d been, what, twenty-one or twenty-two when she first heard that? Living up in London, in that tiny bedsit in Finsbury Park. Handy for the Rainbow it had been. She’d been going out with Terry who did the door at the Roxy at the time. He worked at the Vortex later.
Yep – a paycheck, Jack. She’d done things for money over the years, Julie. She’d stolen. She’d … well, anyway. But if you’d told her back then that she’d end up turning sixty and working in an old folks’ home mopp—
She became aware of a sound, a steady choking noise. She turned – Mr Bledlow, sobbing, his head in his hands, shoulders shaking. She propped the mop against the bed and went over, leaning down by the vinyl-covered armchair. ‘Hey, hey, what’s this now?’
‘I’m sorry,’ the old fellow said, hands still covering his face. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
‘Come on, no need for all this, Alf. Just a little accident.’
‘It ain’t right you having to do this.’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s my job.’ She slid an arm around his shoulder. His hair was like powder, frizzy and silver. You felt like if you breathed on it too hard it’d blow off his head, exploding into the pale, antiseptic air like the stems from a dandelion. ‘Shhh, come on now. Everything’s OK.’ She soothed the old boy, waiting for him to calm down, and looked around the room. The framed photographs of the children and grandchildren who visited once in a blue moon. The jug of weak orange squash. The tobacco tin he kept his loose change in. The grim view of the facing Victorian brickwork from the window. Julie was almost thankful she had no children. There’d be no one to not come and visit her when the time came. No one to not remember her birthday. No one to not spend the requisite minimum time on Christmas Day. No one to … no. Stop it. Best not to think about all that again. She’d been thinking about it too much lately, back at the flat, at night, with the off-brand vodka and her music playing.
She felt him regain his natural breathing tempo as the sobs subsided. ‘That’s better,’ Julie said.
He looked up at her through watery rheumy eyes – eyes that had seen nine decades come and go – and said, with simple, perfect clarity, ‘I don’t like it here.’
Julie felt a spasm in her throat as she stared into the force field of his sorrow: ending your days in a decrepit shithouse run by the lowest bidder, surrounded by strangers. She wanted to say, ‘None of us do, Alf. None of us do.’ But she swallowed her tears, her fear, and said the only thing she could: ‘Cheer up, love. They’ll be along with the tea in a minute.’
The English way – milk and two sugars into the abyss.
Alf managed a smile at that as, behind her, Julie heard an electrical whirr, the bang of the door being shunted open and then the bellowed greeting: ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY, YOU FUCKING OLD SHAGGER!’
She turned round. ‘Morning, Ethel.’
Ethel Merriman, eighty-seven, sat beaming in her electric wheelchair, her ‘grabbing stick’ – a telescopic device with a mechanical claw on the end that enabled Ethel to get hold of things that were out of her reach – tucked in behind her the way a coachman’s musket would once have been carried. Pushing twenty stone now, her hair a mad shock of reddish blonde framing a face that was somehow still pretty, a face that was right now set in its default expression, one best characterised as a merciless leer. Julie noticed Ethel had lipstick on her teeth. On the front of her wheelchair was a ‘WHERE’S THE BEEF?’ bumper sticker. On the back another proclaimed ‘I BRAKE FOR NO ONE’. Ethel took in Mr Bledlow, the bucket, the mop and soiled sheets wrapped in a ball. ‘Oh aye,’ she said. ‘Shat the bed, is it?’
‘Ethel!’ Julie snapped.
‘Hey, no bother,’ Ethel said. ‘Like my Oscar used to say – you’ve not been properly drunk till you’ve shat yourself. Here, Alf.’ Ethel reached under herself and tossed a bag of barley sugars into Alf’s lap. ‘Get stuck into that lot. Nicked them from that old cow Allenby down in 4C.’
‘Ethel!’ Julie said again.
‘You, birthday girl, shut it. Come on – fag break.’ Ethel pulled up the top of her leisure suit – a spectacular powder-blue velour number today – to reveal the pewter hip flask stuck in her waistband. ‘I’m holding.’
‘Jesus Christ …’ Julie sighed as two nurses came back into the room carrying fresh bedding for Alf, pushing their way around Ethel, ignoring her. They had previous. Everyone had previous with Ethel.
‘Morning, Nurse Bull, Nurse Diesel,’ Ethel said cheerfully to no response.
‘Right, five minutes,’ Julie said. ‘You be OK, Alf?’
Alf nodded, gratefully crunching a barley sugar.
‘SIXTY. YOU OLD bastard. You fucking ruin.’
They were out in the sunshine of the fire escape. ‘I know, Ethel. Christ, how did that happen, eh?’ Julie dragged deeply and passed the cigarette back to Ethel, glancing towards the door.
With a grunt Ethel levered herself up out of the wheelchair, trotted the few steps over, and pushed the fire door securely shut. Julie knew that the degree of Ethel’s immobility, like the degree of her deafness, was selective. She could get out of that wheelchair and move a few steps when it suited her all right, like when another resident had left a bag of boiled sweets temptingly unguarded and just out of arm’s reach.
‘Oh, shut up,’ Ethel said, taking the fag with one hand, the other clamped around her hip flask, glittering in the morning sun out here. ‘I’m just taking the piss. Sixty’s nothing. Fuck, when I was your age I was ruling. I had it all, bitch, let me tell you. So much cock …’ She took a pull on whatever was in the flask and let out a long, satisfied ‘ahhhh’ before adding, almost as an afterthought, ‘Fanny too.’ Julie laughed as Ethel offered her the flask. She shook her head. ‘Man up,’ Ethel said, still proffering the booze.
‘It’s just after nine, Ethel!’
‘Did I ask you the time? Did I ask you the fucking time?’
‘And I’ve got lunch with Susan later.’
‘Oof. Let the party begin.’
‘Oh, stop it. Susan’s all right once you get to know her.’
‘Boring,’ Ethel trilled.
‘And then we’ve got this party thing tonight after her rehearsal. You’re still coming?’
‘A few hours out of here? Even the Wroxham Players are sufferable for that. But to return to the matter in hand.’ Ethel looked at the hip flask, as though it contained the key to all mythologies. ‘You seem to have misunderstood me. I did not ask for the time. Nor did I enquire as to your bastard schedule for the next twenty-four hours. I simply requested that you join me in a drink on your birthday.’
‘Oh God,’ Julie groaned, reaching for the thing. She glanced again towards the fire-escape door and took a quick swallow. She felt neat gin scorching her innards, torching through her like a house fire seeking oxygen. ‘Shiiitttt.’
Ethel laughed. ‘Martini. My own recipe. Well, I say my own. I nicked it from an RAF boy, just after the war. What was the bugger’s name? Cecil? Cedric? Celly? Something wet. Flew Mosquitoes out of Duxford. Not much up top but fit as a Dobermann in the employ of a retailer of meats, if you catch my meaning.’
‘Yes, Ethel. It’s not that obscure, your meaning.’
‘Gin had to be near freezing, viscous, was his rule. And you just rubbed the Vermouth bottle against it.’
She passed the fag back. Julie took it and they looked over the rooftops of the home together: chimney pots, puddles on the flat asphalt, TV aerials, decaying brickwork. The sun was already warm though. It looked like it would be a fine day. Ethel watched Julie smoke, her cheeks flushed slightly from the gin and a faraway look in her eyes. ‘Right, out with it,’ Ethel said.
‘What?’
‘Don’t fucking what me.’
‘It’s just … sixty, Ethel. This isn’t where I thought I’d be.’
‘Where did you think you’d be?’
‘I dunno. Somewhere nicer than this. Not living in a rented flat. Mopping up piss.’
‘You think you’ve got problems? Here, give us a last drag on that. Look at me – star of stage and screen reduced to mixing my own cocktails in a locked bathroom and stealing barley sugars from sleeping pensioners.’
‘Were you really famous, Ethel?’
‘From Piccadilly to the Amalfi Coast, darling – if it had a bar and a stage chances are I’ve sung and danced in it.’
They both turned at the sound of someone trying to force the fire-escape door. It was only a second or two before the door scraped open, but that was enough time for Ethel to deftly peg the smouldering butt over the ledge with one hand while, with the other, she reholstered the hip flask like a gunslinger who’d just blown someone away. They found themselves facing the hulking form of Miss Kendal. Kendal was in her mid-thirties, florid of complexion, her hair hanging in a loose greasy fringe. She was crammed into a business suit slightly too small for her and carried her ever-present clipboard. She looked to Ethel like someone who consumed her meal-for-one alone every night and who masturbated joylessly twice a year. She looked like someone who crapped out in the early rounds of The Apprentice.
‘What’s going on out here?’ Kendal asked, already – always – suspicious.
‘Papers please!’ Ethel said in a heavily Germanic accent. Kendal ignored her.
‘Just took Ethel out for some fresh air, Miss Kendal.’
Kendal sniffed nicotine-tainted air, eyes narrowing.
‘Miss Wickham, as you’re leaving us early today, I’m sure there must be some duties you can be attending to?’
‘Yes, Miss Kendal.’
‘Right. Well then.’
The door banged behind her. Instantly Ethel had both sets of V-signs aloft and was blowing the world’s biggest raspberry.
‘Oh, grow up, Ethel,’ Julie said.
SUSAN SAT ALONE at the table in La Taverna, the best Italian restaurant in Wroxham, and sipped her mineral water. She glanced at her watch again. Julie was a little late. (Susan Frobisher and Julie Wickham – with the names they had Susan sometimes thought that the only place they could ever have existed was in some dreary soap opera about Middle England.) The gift-wrapped box nestled beside her and Susan felt the warm, anticipatory tingle of someone who knows they have bought the perfect gift. She’d lied to Barry that morning – she’d spent a lot more on Julie than she’d meant to.
And it did cross Susan’s mind – was there vanity involved in the gift giving, the lunching, with Julie? Was there pride? I can do this, see? Was there even cruelty? Because there had been a time, and it wasn’t even so long ago, when it looked like Julie’s life was going to outstrip her own. She’d travelled a lot, Julie, in her twenties and thirties. London, Europe, America, Australia even. Then she’d come back home at the end of the eighties and there had been the salon, then the boutique, then the second boutique over in Axminster. Running about town in her little SLK. The string of boyfriends, some from London, some of them impossibly glamorous, older than her, younger than her, Julie didn’t care what people thought.
She’d finally settled on Thomas, a debonair colt ten years her junior, and it seemed, for a moment, caught there at the apex of her flight, that Julie ‘had it all’: her own business, handsome young lover, flash car. And there was Susan – still married to boring Barry whom she’d known since school. Pottering about with her roses and her bread-making and her am-dram.
And then it all came crashing down: the tax problem, the business slump, and, finally, young Thomas disappearing one night with the company chequebook, never to be seen again.
It would be unfair to say that Susan had taken comfort in Julie’s fall because it allowed her to be alpha female on deck. Grossly unfair. She did love Julie. But lifelong friendships are curious things – the yardsticks by which we often measure ourselves. They were deep pools where there were tensions, currents and strange eddies that it was best to steer clear of. But, at the end of the day and all that, here they were, both turning sixty this year. It looked like the results were in and Susan was the one with her nose across the finishing line.
And here was her yardstick coming through the door now, already mouthing ‘Sorry!’ Susan’s face broke into a smile as she rose to greet her.
‘Happy birthday, darling!’
The two women embraced, Julie hoping the last blast of Chanel she’d given herself had masked the lingering reek of ammonia and institution. (It had been almost the last of the Chanel too, the small bottle she’d nursed carefully since Susan gave it to her two Christmases ago.)
‘Sorry I’m late. I couldn’t get parked anywhere. Where did you park?’
‘The little one, across from Debenhams?’
‘Oh, right.’ Good. Across from Debenhams. That’d be a left out of the restaurant then. Julie needed to know this.
Susan was signalling to the waitress now who, as arranged, was coming into view with an ice bucket containing a bottle of Moët & Chandon. She placed it on the table with a flourish.
‘Oh God, champagne! Susan!’
‘My treat.’
‘It’ll have to be, love.’
‘I mustn’t have more than two glasses though. I’ll be plastered. You’re still coming to the party tonight, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah, of course. Ethel too.’
‘Oh God. Will she behave?’
‘You know Ethel …’
Susan did know Ethel.
Julie had brought her to their Christmas drinks party last year. She’d drunk six snowballs, lit a cigarette in the kitchen, then propositioned one of the boys working for the catering company in the downstairs bathroom before turning the music off and singing an – admittedly very tuneful – a cappella version of some rugby song, something called ‘Barnacle Bill the Sailor’ (Susan remembered a couplet that went ‘You can sleep upon the mat. Oh, bugger the mat you can’t f*** that.’ She’d thought Jill Worth was going to faint) before Julie wheeled her into the conservatory where she passed out.
As the waitress cracked the cork and Julie settled herself, fussing with napkin, cutlery and menu, Susan decided she couldn’t wait any longer, certainly not until the end of the meal. ‘Oh bugger, look, here, darling. Happy birthday!’ She placed the box on the table.
‘Christ,’ Julie said.
‘Openitopenitopenit …’
‘God! OK! Hang on …’
Julie started fiddling with the bow as the waitress finished pouring the champagne. ‘I’ll give you ladies a few moments with the menus. And happy birthday by the way!’
‘Thank you!’ Julie said.
‘Come on!’ Susan squeaked, clapping her hands together.
With a riiiip Julie tore the paper off. She saw the hallowed words immediately, inscribed right there on the glossy box: CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN.
‘Oh, Susan.’
Another squeak from Susan.
Julie removed the top from the shoebox as carefully as an archaeologist might remove the lid from a sarcophagus. There they were – classic black, open-toed, the famous red soles seeming to almost glow.
‘Oh fuck,’ Julie said.
‘I know it’s a bit OTT but it is your sixtieth and they were on sale and you are the only woman our age I know who still has the legs to carry them off and –’
Susan stopped jabbering. Because she saw that, across the table from her, Julie’s eyes were beginning to brim. And these did not look like the expected joyous tears of gratitude either. They looked like something else entirely. And Julie was not a crier. ‘Julie, are you –’
‘No. Please. Just give me a minute. I don’t want my mascara to run.’ Julie fanned at her face with one hand while taking fast, shallow breaths, her eyes craning upwards, as though trying not to look at the tears forming in the ducts below.
Susan glanced nervously around the restaurant. This wasn’t going at all as she’d imagined it would. After a moment it looked like Julie had it under control. She took a long draught of champagne and gazed at the shoes sadly.
‘What’s the matter? I thought you’d love –’
‘I do love them, Susan. They’re gorgeous. It’s just … where am I going to wear these? Now. At my age. Mopping up at the home?’
‘Come on, love. It’s only temporary. It was all you could get.’
‘Or running for the bus? Sitting in that bloody flat on a Friday night?’ Julie sighed. The shoes said impossible glamour. Infinite promise. All the things Julie was flat out of.
Susan said, ‘Bus?’
Julie sighed. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you. That’s why I asked where you’d parked. I was going to pretend I had to go the other way. I wasn’t late because of parking. I was late because the bloody bus was late. The car broke down three weeks ago. Some bloody manifold arse or other. Five hundred-odd quid they want to fix it.’ About exactly what the shoes cost, Susan had time to reflect while she tried to picture Julie on a bus. That SLK didn’t seem so long ago. ‘It might as well be a million.’
‘Julie.’ Susan leaned across the table, taking her friend’s hand. ‘I’ve told you before, if you want to borrow –’
‘No.’ Julie shook her head. ‘We’re not starting down that road.’
‘But you need your car.’
‘I can barely afford to run it anyway. Have you seen the price of petrol now?’
‘I know.’ Susan couldn’t have told you the price of a litre of petrol with a gun at her head. It just went on the card. Barry dealt with it all. They sat in silence for a moment. The shoes and champagne unregarded on the table between them. The waitress approached the table, notepad at the ready. Susan smiled softly and shook her head and the girl retreated. ‘Well,’ Susan said, ‘some birthday celebration this turned out to be. Nice going, Susan.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. It’s all lovely of you, it’s just … sixty. I mean, you can’t go on fooling yourself at this age, can you? I’m not going through some kind of slump or whatever. This is it. This is how my life turned out, Susan. On my own in a rented flat, working in a care home.’
‘You’re a bit down. Birthdays can be hard.’
‘I just …’
Julie looked out across the restaurant, through the windows, down towards the pub-encrusted town centre where the two of them had run gleefully in their late teens and early twenties, their lives a blur of fun and possibility stretching ahead of them. Julie seemed to see everything that had happened between then and now, all the wrong turns and bad decisions and half-baked schemes appearing to her as a mad parade. ‘I got a gas bill the other day for January to April. Two hundred and fifty quid. For a one-bedroom flat. I just … we’re old, Susan, aren’t we? I can remember bloody Wilson getting elected and I can’t remember life ever being as hard as this. It’s just so fucking hard.’
‘You know what we’re going to?’ Susan said. ‘We’re going to eat something and drink this champagne and then we’re going to go and return these stupid bloody shoes and we’ll use the money to get your car fixed and pay your gas bill. That’s what we’re going to do.’
Julie smiled for the first time in a while and said, ‘Never speak ill of the shoes, Susan.’
DESPITE HER EXCITEMENT Jill Worth took the time to fully engage the handbrake before she got out of her ageing Polo and hurried round to the boot. Using all her strength she lifted the big jar out. It was the kind of jar used to store boiled sweets in old confectionery shops. A hole had been cut in the metal lid and the jar had been filled nearly to the brim with money: silver and bronze coins mainly, but there were a good few crumpled five-pound notes threaded through there as well. ‘Nearly six hundred quid I reckon, Mrs Worth,’ the barman at the Black Swan had told her, proudly slapping the lid. And that was just since Christmas! Less than five months!
She walked carefully up the short path, carrying the jar sideways, like a newborn, and rang the doorbell. She waited a few moments then rang again. Nothing. ‘Linda?’ she called through the door. Muffled noises from up the stairs. Then shouting. ‘Come in, Mum.’ Jill opened the door and walked into the hall grinning with her prize in her arms. When she saw her daughter sat halfway down the stairs, slumped against the wall, her grin crumbled. Linda was a mess – panda eyes, mascara blotched down her cheeks, a sheen of sweat on her forehead. ‘Darling,’ Jill began, ‘what hap—’
‘Oh, Mum, we’ve had a hell of a night.’
Jill set the jar down and came up the stairs towards her. ‘What happened?’
‘Shhh. He’s sleeping now. I just finished getting him down.’
‘Come on,’ Jill said, threading an arm around Linda, helping her up. ‘Let’s go in the kitchen and I’ll put the kettle on.’
In the kitchen, as the kettle began to rumble while Jill busied herself with the cups, tea bags and milk, Linda sat at the small table and talked. ‘He wouldn’t eat, we’ve had to put him back on the drip, he just didn’t want to take his medicine, the new stuff, said his throat hurt, kept spitting it out, getting himself into a right state, till finally Ken and I were both holding him down and it got to a point where he couldn’t breathe, he just … couldn’t catch a breath. It was, Christ, it was horrible. Sorry.’ Her mum didn’t like swears.
‘That’s OK, darling. You’re upset.’
‘Then he couldn’t settle so we were both up and down half the night. God knows what Ken must be like at work today.’
‘Isn’t there some other way to give him the medicine? Tablets? Could you put it in his food?’
‘Apparently not. It’s a suspension. Something to do with the way it works on the lungs.’
Jill brought the tea over and sat down. Her poor daughter. Linda was thirty-five and looked fifty. These past three years, since Jamie was diagnosed, had been brutal. Jill, meanwhile, was wearing quite well at sixty-seven. Still drove herself everywhere. ‘The day you drive a car is the day they carry me out of here in a pine box,’ her Derek used to say. He was right in the end – Jill had started taking driving lessons right after he died. Twelve years ago now.
‘What’s that, Mum?’ Linda asked, nodding down the hall towards the jar sitting by the front door.
‘Oh! One of the collecting jars, from the Black Swan on the high street. Nearly six hundred pounds they think! Since Christmas! How about that?’
‘Oh, bless them,’ Linda said. Then she burst into tears.
‘Shhh, come on, darling.’ Jill pulled her daughter to her. ‘Inch by inch. We’ll get there.’
‘Oh, Mum, I don’t think we’re ever going to get there.’
‘Of course we will. Rome wasn’t built in a day.’
‘If you’d seen him last night … he … he …’ the words coming between sobs, her face buried in Jill’s neck, ‘he looked like he was drowning, Mum. The fear in his eyes. He was terrified.’
‘Oh, darling.’
‘All this bloody Rome wasn’t built in a day and we’ll get there. Chicago, the whole thing, I sometimes think it’d be kinder if he just, if he just –’
Jill grabbed her daughter’s face and twisted it up to hers. ‘That’s enough, Linda. You hear me? Enough now. I won’t have that kind of talk. I simply will not have it. God has a plan for that boy and he is going to live.’ Linda collapsed sobbing in her mother’s arms. ‘There, dear. There, there,’ Jill said. ‘You’re just exhausted. You’re not thinking properly. We are going to fix this.’
‘Oh, Mum …’
Jill held her while she cried. After a while she said, ‘Go on now. I’ll go up and sit with him for a bit. You go through and lie down on the sofa and have a lovely nap. You’ll feel much better. I can stay tonight if you want.’
‘Haven’t you got your am-dram stuff?’
‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll manage without me.’
‘No, please, Mum, you go. Ken’s back at five. If I can just get forty winks …’
‘OK. Come on, let’s get you settled. I’ll come down in a bit and make us some lunch.’
After she’d laid a blanket over her daughter Jill crept quietly up the stairs and into her grandson’s room. The curtains were drawn, giving it the authentically sleepy tang of the sick ward. Jill sat down in the armchair next to the bed and looked at Jamie, sleeping. It was incredible, you’d never have thought it to look at him. Other than the canula going into the back of his left hand, leading to the bag of glucose on a stand, there was nothing to tell you how sick he was. A bit pale, yes, but basically a perfectly beautiful five-year-old boy. Nothing to suggest that, in the words of one of the doctors, he had the lungs ‘of a seventy-year-old miner’.
De Havilland’s syndrome – which was about as rare as it came. Basically the tissue of his lungs was corroding unusually fast. Breathing difficulties obviously. He struggled to clear his airways. Eating and drinking were difficult. In many ways it was like Linda and Ken had been dealing with the stress of a newborn for five years now. There was one specialist unit in the world performing an operation that had proved successful in stopping, even reversing, the disease. At St Michael’s in Chicago.
Jill looked up from the bed, towards the wall above it. On it was a big poster, a poster Jill had helped to make. It was a thermometer. Below the thermometer were the words ‘JAMIE’S OPERATION’; above it the target figure: £60,000. The level of the thermometer had been coloured in red up to just below the £30,000 mark. It had taken all of the tiny bit of savings Jill had, all of Linda and Ken’s, donations from friends and family and three years of writing letters and putting jars and tins in local pubs and shops to get here, to get to just below halfway.
Jamie coughed and stirred a little in his sleep.
Jill swept a strand of the boy’s fine blond hair out of his face and soothed his brow. He murmured and turned onto his side. She held his hand and leaned back a little in the chair, gazing up at that home-made thermometer on the wall still hopelessly, infuriatingly short of the magic figure. Jill allowed herself to think something that she never, ever thought.
Would another three years be too late?
‘BLOW, WINDS, AND CRACK YOUR CHEEKS!’
Susan watched, only mildly astonished, as Lear, played by that frightful old ham Bill Murdoch, roared and threw his hands out wide, catching the Fool, played by sweet little Freddy Watson, square in the face with the left, sending him careering sideways into a piece of heathland scenery, sending it crashing onto the floor, making Jill Worth jump up in her seat, causing her to scream as she plunged the needle she was using to sew Regan’s torn costume into the soft pad of her thumb. ‘Bother!’ she yelped. (Jill was about the only person Susan could think of who actually would say ‘Bother!’ or ‘SUGAR!’ when hitting her thumb with a hammer.) Frank the director put his head in his hands and emitted a low whine as onstage the rehearsal – the final dress rehearsal – ground to a halt amid the bickering familiar to anyone who had attended their fair share of Wroxham Players rehearsals.
‘Bloody hell, Bill!’
‘You were too close! You know I do that then!’
‘Oh, this bush is cracked now.’
‘Yes, gentlemen, can we –’
‘I need to stand there so –’
‘Can’t you –’
‘Where’s props? Props!’
‘The audience won’t care where you are, Freddy! It’s –’
‘EVERYONE!’ Frank roared. Silence. ‘Can we, let’s just take a moment.’ He got up from his seat in the row in front of Susan and headed for the stage, a muttered ‘Jesus’ escaping him.
‘Are you OK, Jill?’ Susan asked. Jill was furiously sucking her thumb.
‘Mmmm. Just … didn’t want to get blood on the costume. We don’t have a spare.’
‘Shall I get you a plaster?’
‘No, thank you, Susan. It’ll be fine.’ She shook her hand like she was holding an invisible thermometer.
‘Bloody Bill Murdoch,’ Agnes Coren said, looking up from her magazine. ‘You take your life in your hands every scene you’re in with him.’ Agnes was playing Regan and took great relish in every sadism the play allowed her to visit on her co-star. ‘Did you see earlier? In his whole “reason not the need” bit? Grabbed my bloody hand. I thought he was going to break my wrist!’
‘Yes,’ Susan said. ‘He does rather like to go for it.’
Agnes looked at her watch. ‘Roll on six o’clock. I’m dying for a drink.’ Over on the side of the hall glasses, a case of red wine and a few bowls of nibbles sat on a trestle table. Next to the table was a black plastic bin filled with ice containing white wine and beers. It was tradition, after final rehearsal, before opening night: a small gathering for friends and family, all of whom had undoubtedly helped with learning lines, contributing clothing for costumes and buying more tickets than was strictly reasonable.
‘Mmmm,’ Susan said, sipping her coffee. Her head was still fuzzy from the champagne earlier with Julie. She shouldn’t drink at lunchtime, she really shouldn’t. ‘Mind you, I can’t help feeling this party might be a bit premature.’ She nodded towards the stage where Frank was negotiating between Bill and Freddy. Johnny Grainger was hurriedly repainting the damaged bit of scenery.
‘Be all right on the night, love,’ Agnes said. ‘It’s like this every time.’
‘True.’
‘I’m making some tea. Anyone want one?’
‘No thank you,’ Jill and Susan chorused as Agnes went off across the hall.
‘OK!’ Frank was saying, coming back down the steps, clapping his hands together. ‘From the top of the scene, let’s go again.’
‘BLOW, WINDS, AND CRACK YOUR CHEEKS!’
Susan sipped her coffee and turned the page of her magazine. She became aware that, in the seat in front of her, Jill’s shoulders were shaking.
‘Jill … are you …?’
‘Oh dear, I’m sorry, Susan.’
Jill turned round and Susan saw in the half-light that her face was glistening. Surely she couldn’t have hurt herself that badly?
‘What is it?’