by Daisy Pearce
Chapter 5
I meet Alice on the same day I lose my purse and can’t get home. I am one of those woman who crams everything they need into one place – Oyster card, cash, credit cards, ID – and now I’m standing on the street in a thin rain, outside my bank who have refused to give me any money without identification. I’m in South Kensington and although I am fairly sure I left my purse on the Overground, I am also quite certain it could be at home. Maybe. Carmel is not answering her phone, and home is a ten-mile walk. So I end up walking half an hour or so to Marco’s office. It is a big Georgian property in Bedford Square with a brass plaque on the door. ‘Nilsen, Swann & Partners’.
The first time I’d introduced Carmel to him she’d smiled and said, ‘Nilsen? Like Dennis Nilsen? The mass murderer?’
‘Only nicer,’ Marco had said, smiling.
She had nodded. ‘Uh-huh. His victims thought that too.’
It is Alice who buzzes me in. The woman from the train station. Thin and aristocratic-looking with pink sugared-almond fingernails.
‘Mr Nilsen – Marco – isn’t available,’ she tells me, when I ask. ‘He won’t be back till this evening and not at work till tomorrow.’
I tell her what has happened, and she looks at me flintily, as though she doesn’t believe me. I must admit I probably look a state – I have been taking Marco’s pills almost daily, at least four or five a day, sometimes more. I like the feeling they give me of drifting, as though my feet float above the ground. She asks me if I would like her to call a cab. Tells me they can put it on the company account. I nod, relieved.
‘I’m so grateful,’ I tell her. ‘My dad died, you see – it was very sudden, and, and—’ Oh God, am I crying? I swipe angrily at my eyes. What is happening to me?
Alice smiles stiffly. ‘I heard. I’m very sorry, Stella. For your loss.’
We are both silent for a moment. She looks at the phone, perhaps hoping it will ring. Behind her is a bright contemporary painting.
I point at it. ‘That’s a David Hockney.’
‘Yes. It’s called “Amaryllis In Vase”. I think it was bought at auction.’
‘It’s an original? That must have cost a fortune.’
‘Oh, yes. We have a number of them from the same collection. You’re the first person to recognise it.’
‘I studied art at university. Art history. I wanted to curate galleries. Funny how things turn out.’
‘Oh? Marco told me you were an actress.’
‘Was. Was an actress. I was in Marigold!. On the BBC.’
‘Sure, I know it.’
She’s lying, of course. She’s good at it, but I lived half my life with my father, a man who had once told his thirteen-year-old daughter that her mother had not suffered at the end.
‘I wrote my thesis on David Hockney,’ she continues, turning in her chair to face the picture. ‘I went to an exhibition in San Francisco in 2013 – I mean, I made the trip especially. Do you know the first thing Marco said when he saw this piece?’
I shake my head.
‘He said he thought flowers in a vase was a bit unimaginative. “Unimaginative”.’
‘He’s a heathen,’ I say. Alice looks up at me with those cool, grey eyes and chances a smile, very small and fleeting.
‘Would you like to wait in Marco’s office, Stella? I’ll buzz you when the taxi arrives.’
‘Oh, yes. Thank you. I will.’
I go through to a large, airy room with a long window overlooking the street below. Marco’s desk is a long block of polished walnut wood behind which sits a large leather chair, intimidating and almost imperious. There are no more paintings on the walls in here, just framed black-and-white photographs and an old map of London, sepia-tinted. I move behind his desk and lean on the chair, running my hands over its worn softness. My fingers move dreamily over the surface of the desk; an ashtray containing a cigar stub, a glass of water smeared with fingerprints, a single, unopened bar of hotel soap. I experience a sudden jolt when I see the picture of Carmel on Marco’s computer. In it she’s smiling, mouth half open, dark eyes fixing the lens. It’s impossible to tell where she is and I’m gripping the back of the chair too tight and then suddenly the photo slides to the left and another takes its place, this time of Marco and me in Lisbon at a pavement café, both of us grinning and tanned. Frowning, I reach forward to click on the keyboard but then another picture slides into view and I realise what is happening. It’s just a slideshow. Pictures from his phone saved to the computer that come up when it’s powered down. The one at the hotel does the same. There’s another one of me, and then moments later another of Carmel from the same night and this time I’m in it and we’re leaning our heads together, laughing. My brain feels soupy as I watch the shots flick past; a black Labrador that belongs to his parents, a photo of a younger Marco with a woman in the sun, another of me in a café, strap of my dress sliding down my shoulder. I’m looking guilelessly at the camera in this one, the light soft on my face. He took it recently. I remember going to the café. I remember that I ordered French toast but wished I’d had pancakes instead. What I don’t remember is that strange, blank expression on my face, my hair fuzzy and unkempt, eyes deeply socketed. Is that mess me? I think, staring. Is that what I look like these days? Then the phone buzzes so suddenly I feel a flash of heat race through me and Alice’s voice on the speaker says, ‘Stella, your taxi is here.’
The taxi driver knows me. He keeps stealing glances in his rear-view mirror until we stop at some lights. Then he turns in his seat, eyebrows raised.
‘No way. It is you, isn’t it? From that show. Years ago.’
I smile tightly.
‘I thought it was when I saw you. Do you know what, I wouldn’t have recognised you either, only I had your mate in here a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Eddie.’
I stare blankly at him for a second or two until my brain makes the connection.
‘You mean Joey Fraser?’
‘That’s him. He hasn’t changed, has he? I told him, I said he hadn’t aged a bit. Do you know what he said? He said Hollywood suited him. He was right. He looks twenty if a day.’
I’m grinding my teeth again. I can hear the clicking noise my jaw is making. The taxi driver is still talking but a dull heat is building in my chest. My blood pulses hot.
‘He said he was over here for the funeral. I suppose you’ll all be going, won’t you? Here, when you see him, you tell him Lee says hello? He’ll remember me.’
‘What— What funeral?’
The taxi driver looks at me in the mirror again and his expression is impossible to read.
‘Lesley Patterson.’
Lesley Patterson. I have to think for a minute. Older than me, with long red braids down to her waist. Not now, of course. Then, I mean. She had played my sister Lucy in the show. She’d had freckles and goofy teeth and when she’d had braces fitted at thirteen they’d taken all her lines away. I swallow, clutching hold of the seat for support.
‘She’s dead?’
‘You didn’t know? It was in the papers.’
‘What happened?’
Suicide. It hadn’t made the front page. It was a small story on page eleven, next to a recall advert for baby food. She’d died of carbon monoxide poisoning, the report said. I Google further and discover she’d fed a hosepipe from the exhaust through the window of her car in the little garage attached to the house. Her husband had discovered her nearly seven hours later, when he’d noticed the dogs barking at the garage door.
My phone starts ringing. Marco. I pick up.
‘Did you know about this? About Lesley Patterson?’ I ask him.
‘Hello to you too. Yes, I did.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I did.’
I catch my breath.
‘When?’
‘When it happened, last week. We talked about it over dinner. Remember?’
I stare at the
wall. I don’t remember, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I’m so hazy on things these days.
‘I don’t, no. I don’t remember.’
‘Are you okay? You said at the time it didn’t bother you. You and Lesley weren’t close, you said.’
That sounds about right, like something I’d say. Because of course we hadn’t been close, had we? She barely spoke to me on set, and off set they would all go and play cards together, without telling me. I’d walked in on them all once, all five of them, the Marigold children. Teasing each other, playing with Lego, laughing. Their faces had fallen when they’d seen me. The room had gone horribly quiet. I’d only been seven years old. I’d just wanted to join in.
‘No, I suppose we weren’t.’
‘Listen, this isn’t why I called. You’ve left your purse in my car. Shall I bring it round?’
‘Yes. I’ve been looking for that everywhere. Could’ve sworn I left it at home.’
‘Nope. It’s right here. I’ll drop it back, I’m only twenty minutes away. There’s – uh – there’s a lot of money in it, Stella.’
‘Is there?’
‘Yeah. About three hundred pounds in cash. Is there anything you want to tell me? You’re not dealing drugs, are you?’
He laughs nervously. I don’t know what to tell him. I don’t remember taking that money out, but I suppose I must have done at some point. It seems like a lot, and I wish I could remember what I needed it for. It’s not the first time I’ve done something impulsive with money. I once paid for Carmel and me to go to Ibiza when she’d been so skint she’d been eating ketchup sandwiches with sachets stolen from the local café.
I hang up, drumming my fingers restlessly. I can feel the edges of myself and the anxiety that waits there, sharp as blades. I hope Marco will have some more pills for me. I deserve some more pills.
Chapter 6
‘She was unhappy,’ Aunt Jackie had told me after my mother’s suicide in 1994, the year I turned thirteen. ‘She had suffered years of clinical depression,’ the local paper had said, while the report in the Cambridge Courier had described her as being ‘prone to spells of melancholy’. It made her sound pre-Raphaelite. My father had said she had never been the same since I was born, a weight I carried with me for almost a decade until my first round of therapy in my twenties. I believed him, you see, believed that my birth – painful and messy and bloody – had somehow triggered this suicidal impulse in my mother, like a switch completing a circuit which lit something in her head.
I didn’t find out about the debt we were in until we were forced to sell the house a year after her death, and even then I didn’t understand. When I asked my father he simply said they had made some bad financial decisions. He didn’t tell me that those decisions had been made with cash in unmarked brown envelopes in a bookie’s where the smoke hung in the air like a medieval mist. When my mother had asked him to stop before he ran us into the ground, my father, always convinced of his next big win, had started placing bets in secret. He’d drained my account first, the one my mother had set up for me with the money made from the Marigold! series. She’d been clever enough to insist I couldn’t touch it before I was eighteen but not clever enough to stop my dad occasionally forging her signature on the account book he used to make the withdrawals. He’d intercepted the statements until all the money was gone, every penny I’d earned, bled away.
Once Mum discovered the extent of it – the overdraft, the remortgage, the loan sharks, the money missing from the emergency kitty she had stored behind the loose bricks of the fireplace – that was the beginning, I think. The long slide down. I would dream of horses, in all my years at college. Pounding hooves, sprays of turf, the smart flat crack of the riding crop. I would dream of my dad and me in the stands and in his hands hundreds and hundreds of betting slips, some stuffed in his pockets, some drifting to his feet like confetti, too many to hold. We were screaming the names of the horses until sweat sprang to our brows and always, always, it would change, and we would be screaming my mother’s name until our voices cracked and shook.
I wonder how he felt. That blood clot slowly moving towards the soft, vulnerable part of his brain. How it felt to lie in his tiny rented flat with the slow, mournful buzz of the freezer and inside it, encased in ice, their wedding rings, the two most precious things he owned.
Ten minutes after Marco arrives Carmel is home, her hair damp with the rain. She makes herself tea and stands in the doorway to the kitchen, her hands wrapped around the mug.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me how my day went?’
‘How was your day?’
‘You know what today was, don’t you?’ She lights a cigarette. ‘Remember, Stella? It was the day I met Beatrice d’Aramitz from the Paris office.’
‘I thought Paris wasn’t until next month.’
She smiles, and it looks just a little too forced.
‘It is next month. Today I met Beatrice at a preliminary interview. Remember?’
‘Of course. How did it go?’
‘I aced it. I really think I did. She’s lovely and, what’s more, she really likes me.’
‘That’s fantastic. Well done.’
‘Here,’ Marco says. He is holding out my purse to me. ‘Before I forget to give it to you. I’d put that money somewhere safe if I was you. God knows where you’ll leave it next time.’
‘Is that for me?’
I look up at Carmel. Marco has given me the last of his pills and now there are just five left in the little bottle. Already I feel blurry, a smear of Vaseline over the lenses of my eyes.
‘That money. The money I asked for.’
I look down at the purse and back up at Carmel again. That jogs something in my memory, a fishhook, tugging. I take it all, all those lovely crisp notes I must have taken out of the bank, and hold them out to her. Marco grabs my arm, not hard, just a little pressure.
‘Hang on, Stella. What’s going on?’
‘Carmel asked to borrow some money. She’s short on rent this month. It’s fine.’
‘How can you afford it on your wages?’
‘I have savings,’ I say simply, as Carmel takes the money from me. She is smiling but doesn’t look happy.
‘Three hundred,’ I say. It’s not a question. ‘Is that right?’
‘Yes. Thank you. I promise I’ll pay you back.’
‘New shoes, Carmel?’ Marco asks her. She looks down at her feet, we all do. They’re beautiful, glossy black leather heels. Expensive. Now I have no difficulty reading her expression. She looks angrily at Marco.
‘I needed them for the interview. They’re an investment in my future.’
Marco scratches his cheek and looks at me. He plants a hand on my shoulder. The effect is proprietary but I am too cloudy to shrug it off. I am tired, I am tired.
Carmel is excited. We are crowding around the computer, Martha and her and I, leaning into each other, laughing.
‘Look, look,’ she is saying, scribbling something on the pad beside her. Martha is sipping ginger tea, taking tiny bites of dry crackers.
‘I am sick like a dog,’ she tells us when she arrives, ‘and these’ – pointing at her breasts – ‘weigh more than baby elephants. This is hell.’
Carmel is looking for venues for her birthday party, somewhere we can dance and drink and look good in photos. We started with stately homes and now we’re looking at ballrooms.
‘I want glamour. Remember Kate Moss’s thirtieth? Faded elegance. The beautiful and the damned.’
‘Can’t we just open some crisps and go to the Red Lion?’ I ask her, only half joking. Carmel looks at me, alarmed. I have told her I will help to pay for this party. Her initial refusal was flimsy, and it did not take long to talk her round. Now her parents are covering the rest and she is excited, making plans. Her guest list is nearly two hundred people. That’s the thing with Carmel, everyone wants to know her. She could invite twice that many. Martha sits down carefully, tucking her hair behind
her ears. She has perfect hair, almost white-blonde and soft as mouse fur. I always find myself wanting to stroke it.
‘You will need staff for a party this size,’ Martha says. ‘Maybe to serve drinks and take coats?’
‘There’ll be a bar,’ Carmel tells us, ‘and for everything else there’s you two.’
Martha and I exchange an amused glance. She looks closely at me.
‘Stella – have you changed your face?’
I laugh. Carmel turns to look at me over her shoulder.
‘I noticed too,’ she said. ‘You look different. Less make-up. Not just today, either. The last couple of weeks or so.’
‘I just fancied a change.’
‘But you love make-up! No one can do eyeliner like you.’
‘I – I’m just trying something new. You don’t like it? Marco thinks it makes me look younger.’
‘Marco’s hardly Estée bloody Lauder, is he?’
Carmel turns away from me. I can’t tell if her anger is real or pretend. I fold my arms.
‘I think you look very nice,’ Martha says, the peacekeeper, the diplomat. She sips her ginger tea. ‘You look like you are healthy.’
‘“Healthy”. Every woman’s dream,’ Carmel drawls.
‘What’s your problem?’
Carmel turns to face me. She likes confrontation, thrives on it. Me, I end up shaking, light-headed. Usually I avoid it, but these days have not been usual.
‘Stella. Calm down. I’m just saying it’s funny how you’ve changed.’
‘I’ve changed?’ I look at them both, one to the other and back again. ‘How have I changed? How?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Oh, piss off, Carmel.’
I’m so angry. I can feel it like a hot throbbing in my chest. Carmel blinks, shocked. But she is still smiling.
‘Well. We hardly see you anymore and when we do—’
‘What?’
‘You’re with Marco.’
‘You’re annoyed with me for having a boyfriend?’
