Something to Tell You

by Lucy Diamond

  Glancing into her rear-view mirror, she exchanged a look with the cardboard replica of herself propped in the back seat. ‘Here we are, kid,’ she said. ‘Let’s get ready to wow the weight-watchers all over again.’ Ever since she’d won SlimmerYou’s ‘Slimmer of the Year’, she’d been doing these inspirational talks to dieting groups around the North, standing beside her double-chinned cardboard self and enjoying the way people looked with genuine respect from the old version of her to the current svelte incarnation. You did it, their eyes said, and you could see the longing on their faces, not to mention the admiration and – quite often – the envy.

  SlimmerYou paid her a small fee plus travel expenses, but it wasn’t something you would do for the money alone. Nevertheless, Bunny had discovered that there was a certain catharsis about telling her story again and again, through Yorkshire and Lancashire and Merseyside. It was unexpectedly affirming, too. With every musty church hall, with every rapt listening face in the rows of seats, she found herself surprised anew at her own dogged determination as she detailed her route to success. I really did that, she would sometimes marvel, smiling graciously as the audience applauded her afterwards.

  She leaned across to the passenger footwell, retrieved the pink sash that SlimmerYou had requested she wore, then got out, opening the back door to haul out her enormous cardboard self from the rear seats. ‘Let’s be having you then, my darling,’ she said, tucking the figure under her arm. Despite having hated her nineteen-stone bulk at the time, these days Bunny felt nothing but compassion towards her cardboard doppelgänger; that woman who had been so downtrodden and meek and scared, yet who had discovered a seam of unexpected gutsiness. Who had finally found the courage to say, No. Enough.

  Her throat tightened, as it always did whenever she thought about the bad old days. But they were all behind her, she reminded herself. She was Bunny Halliday now, and she could handle anything.

  Right then. There was a room full of slimmers who were waiting for inspiration. For her. Briskly locking the car, she held her head high and marched towards the church-hall entrance.

  Was there anything lovelier than walking through your own front door, after a busy day’s work, and knowing that your favourite TV programmes awaited, along with a very nice microwave Meal-for-One and an even nicer bottle of wine? No, thought Alison, sliding the bolt across, then kicking off her shoes. No, there was not. She knew how to have a fun night, all right. Whatever her daughter might think.

  ‘Aren’t you lonely, though? Do come and join us, if you want some company,’ Robyn would offer regularly, approximately nine million times in the last year alone. It was the ‘us’ that hurt Alison the most. The ‘us’ that meant Robyn and the rest of the Mortimers as a combined unit, with Alison on the sidelines. Oh, she was sure her daughter’s in-laws were very nice people; Robyn certainly adored them all. But this only made Alison feel inadequate in comparison, as if the Mortimers were a proper family, giving Robyn what Alison had never been able to provide for her. Giving Sam and Daisy cousins and aunts and uncles and party-throwing grandparents too, none of which they had when they came round to her place.

  She should have known it would be like this, right from Robyn and John’s wedding, when the Mortimer side of the church was stuffed so full of relatives and friends that they’d had to edge into Robyn’s side, which consisted merely of Alison plus a handful of university friends. Even then, the balance had been there for all to see. Worse, Jeanie had made some comment to Alison a few years ago, out of misguided sympathy – ‘It must be hard, being on your own sometimes, Alison’, or something similar. Yes, okay, so no doubt the words had been meant with kindness, but all the same they had jabbed into Alison like little barbs. The other woman’s pity. The other woman’s condescension. How dreadfully hard it must be for Alison, with no husband and no huge family get-togethers and no flock of doting children!

  Er, no actually. More like, how patronizing could you get? Because it wasn’t hard, and she wasn’t lonely, thank you very much. How could anyone be lonely when they worked as a mobile hairdresser and spent every day in different houses, cutting hair and listening to clients’ stories? Besides, she had all her pals on the Telly Addicts forum, some of whom had become dear friends over the years. She had her pride too, which was why she had said, ‘No thank you’ to Jeanie Mortimer’s invitations ever since. Because life was too short to have your nose rubbed in it, in Alison’s opinion. Count her out.

  Twenty minutes later she had her feet up in front of the TV, a plate of microwaved lasagne on her knee, a glass of chilled wine on the coffee table and the laptop open at her side. The muggy weather had burst at last, and rain was pelting against the windows, leaving long wet streaks. There was even a rumble of thunder overhead. Good. Alison loved a thunderstorm when you were warm and cosy inside. And she’d just remembered there was one last Crunchie ice-cream bar in the freezer for afters. Heaven, right there.

  Evening all, she typed between mouthfuls, once she’d logged into the forum. How’s everyone doing tonight? I see we have a few new members with us – welcome! We’re a very friendly bunch here and looking forward to talking telly with you! Now for the big question: what’s everyone watching tonight?

  She flicked on the TV, humming to herself as she went through that evening’s programme guide. There was a detective drama on at nine, the first episode of which she’d enjoyed very much last week. Before then, the tennis was on BBC2, which was quite soothing; one of the sounds of summer, she always thought – the clop and swish of racquet hitting ball. Plus, of course, there was no small amount of pleasure to be had from watching those very athletic young men in their nice white shorts; always an enjoyable way to while away the hours. What else? Well, good old Coronation Street, obviously, and—

  BOOM! Crack!

  Thunder crashed outside, lightning flashed and then there was a violent bang directly overhead, followed by the television making an alarming fizzling noise and going completely blank. ‘Oh!’ gulped Alison aloud, spluttering on her wine in shock. For a second she sat there frozen, hunched over with fright, as if the ceiling was about to come down on her in a shower of plaster, before she unfolded herself again with a wary glance around. Unfortunately the television remained silent and apparently dead. ‘Oh . . . bugger,’ she added unhappily. She pressed the remote, trying to switch the thing back on, but nothing happened. ‘You’re kidding me,’ she groaned, stabbing repeatedly at the button with no success. ‘Please. No!’

  Well, she’d gone right off” thunderstorms, that was for sure. Had lightning struck the satellite dish? she wondered anxiously. Were all the electrics in the house now trashed? She thought with a pang of her Crunchie ice-cream awaiting her in the freezer and jumped to her feet. No, the lights were still working at least, she realized, flipping them on and off. And when she went into the kitchen, the fridge was purring obediently, the clock on the cooker displaying the correct time.

  Rain continued to slap against the windows as she returned to the sofa and ate another mouthful of lasagne. Okay, so she would have to watch her programmes on the laptop, she supposed, just until she could get someone round to figure out what was wrong with the TV. One of her clients, Becky, had an electrician husband who might be able to fix it for her, she comforted herself. But when she tried to refresh her laptop screen, she was faced with an error message instead of her home page. No internet connection can be detected, it said unhelpfully and she let out a growl of frustration. ‘Oh come on!’ Had the lightning frazzled her broadband as well? Her grasp of electricity and circuits – of technology in general, let’s face it – was flaky at the best of times, but she was not feeling hopeful.

  She munched glumly on the lasagne before pushing the plate away, her mood souring. No telly. No Internet. She had her phone, and the mobile data on that at least . . . but who wanted to watch a programme on a tiny screen? It would give her a headache within two minutes, even with her reading glasses on. So what was she supposed to do now?r />
  It was at times like this – few and far between, admittedly – that she found herself missing Rich. Thirty-three years had ticked by since he’d died, but he still sometimes appeared in her head, frozen in time with his favourite checked shirt and corduroy trousers, his tufty brown hair and that calm way he had of dealing with a problem. ‘Let’s see what we can do here then,’ he would have said, had he been with her now. Give him a screwdriver, tuck a pencil behind his ear and he’d be away, whistling cheerfully between his teeth as he tackled whatever new practical test lay ahead. Alison was quite sure that many of his shelves and bookcases would still be standing, back in their old house in Wolverhampton; ditto the shed he’d put together one Sunday afternoon, lengths of wood all over the lawn like a gigantic timber jigsaw. That huge workbench he’d built in the garage, too: sturdy as anything. It would take a meteorite to blast through the roof to destroy that. The evenings he’d spent there, happily tinkering with his beloved vintage car – a red Jensen Interceptor that he was doing up – it had been his idea of bliss, quite frankly.

  Not that Alison liked to think about the garage at their old house for long, obviously. You couldn’t dwell on these things. But the memory poked insidiously at her, regardless: how she’d woken up on that still, soundless Sunday morning to find his half of the bed empty; how she’d felt that throat-tightening impulse of dread, strong enough to send her tiptoeing past Robyn’s bedroom and downstairs. Rich had lost his job as foreman of a building site three months earlier, after being wrongly accused of theft, and he hadn’t been the same since. Down she’d padded to the kitchen, where a note lay propped up beside the kettle: I’m sorry. And she’d seen the door ajar between the utility room and the garage, and she’d dashed through uselessly to find . . .

  The bitter smell of turps. The soft speckles of sawdust on the workbench. And that grotesque creaking of a rope, twisting slightly from the rafter as her husband’s body dangled, limp and unresponsive. She had staggered away as if punch-drunk, knocking over a box of Rawlplugs, her mouth open in a silent scream of horror. No. No!

  Decades later, in the safety of her quiet Harrogate living room, Alison gave a violent shudder and tipped back the rest of her wine in a single gulp, trying to block out the image, to shut the door on it, just as she had done in real life. She’d closed that door tight, locked it, put the key in her dressing-gown pocket, because there were some things in life that a child should not see, should not have to deal with, should never be told about even. Then, with the same numb composure, she’d called her mum – ‘I need you to come and get Robyn for me. Please. As soon as possible’ – before screwing up the note Rich had left (‘Why’s he sorry? Did he break something?’ Robyn, a child brimming with questions, would ask, if she saw it) and burying it deep in the kitchen bin, beneath the teabags and potato peelings and eggshells.

  A sudden heart attack, she’d told Robyn a few days later, when it was safe for her to come home, all evidence of her father’s true death discreetly removed by a pair of kind policemen; a packet of prescription sleeping tablets newly arrived on Alison’s bedside table, the only thing that could knock her out at night. Was it wrong to rewrite history, to blur a few lines, when it was your own child you were protecting? Whatever – she had stuck to the story ever since, moving to a new house, a new area, just as soon as she could, to escape any gossip that might be lingering.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, stop it,’ Alison said viciously to herself now, standing up suddenly and walking quickly into the kitchen, as if trying to shake off these dark memories with the movement. ‘What is the point? Stop brooding, you stupid woman.’ She poured out more wine and drank the glass straight down while she was standing there at the kitchen worktop, the alcohol puckering her mouth like medicine, the thunder still booming and rumbling outside.

  In the next moment, as the thunder rolled away, she heard a voice from the other room, a male voice speaking urgently, and for a second she thought she was going mad, that she had somehow conjured up her long-dead husband. Mad? Or drunk? She rushed back to the living room, only to see – oh, thank heavens! – the television back on again and a newsreader speaking solemnly about the latest refugee crisis, at which point she collapsed heavily into the sofa, a sob escaping her throat.

  ‘Thank you,’ she croaked to the television.

  A power surge? A loose connection? Who knew, but there was her laptop busily refreshing itself as well, all back to normal. Panic over.

  She wiped her eyes, then blew her nose, trembling with relief. ‘Pull yourself together,’ she scolded herself. ‘Daft old bat, getting in a state like that.’ She put a hand to her chest, feeling her heart pumping too fast. ‘It’s all right now. Come on, you’re okay. You’re okay.’

  Chapter Six

  In stressful times there was something about having a young, inquisitive child that was very grounding, Frankie thought over the next few days. Like all four-year-olds, Fergus lived completely in the now: exuberant one moment, asking a string of complicated questions in the next, and then completely ignoring the answers in order to squat down and examine a crawling beetle or an interestingly shaped puddle a second later. He demanded attention in such a sweet and innocent way, Frankie was happy to give it to him. As a result, by the middle of the week she was almost starting to feel as if the disastrous Yorkshire trip was a strange dream rather than something that had actually happened. Flashes of the experience would come back to her – Harry Mortimer’s stunned expression as their eyes met, his unexpected height, the disbelieving way he’d said her mother’s name . . . all with a rowdy version of a Tom Jones song in the background. None of it seemed quite real any more.

  ‘What will you do now?’ Craig asked gently when two days had passed and she hadn’t revisited the subject of her father. ‘Are you going to try again? Write him a letter or something?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she’d replied, wrinkling her nose. ‘Maybe. I probably should. But then again, what would I say? I don’t want to make everything worse for him.’

  ‘How could someone as glorious and delightful as you make things worse for anyone?’ Craig had asked.

  Frankie wasn’t convinced she wanted to answer that. While she appreciated his cheerleading support, she was pretty sure her surprise appearance hadn’t exactly made things better for Harry’s wife. Or Harry himself, judging by the look on the other woman’s face.

  She would do what she always did, she supposed. Nothing. Let the whole situation drift to a distant horizon, allow it to become sidelined by the real and more pressing matters of everyday life. Who needed a biological father anyway? Her mum had married Gareth Carlyle when Frankie was twelve – amiable, easy-going Gareth who’d been a good enough substitute dad, even though he had jetted off for a sunny retirement in Palma earlier this year; his way of coping with widowerhood, Frankie guessed. Perhaps at some point in the future she’d feel like trying again with Harry, but for now she would plump for denial and not dwell on it.

  On Thursday, she dropped Fergus at playgroup for his morning session as usual, exchanged pleasantries about the sunny weather with a couple of the other mums, then stopped on the way home at the deli, to pick up two cappuccinos for her and Craig as a surprise treat. At some point in the future – maybe even in the autumn when Fergus started school – they were hoping to rent some decent office space in which to work (Frankie dreamed of a light-filled attic studio with huge windows). Until then, though, they’d have to carry on making do at opposite ends of their kitchen table, taking it in turns to look after Fergus, make lunch, chase up unpaid invoices and bung on a load of laundry in between.

  ‘Your own cottage industry, how charming!’ various friends had commented over the years, as if the two of them lived and worked in a beautiful stone farmhouse, with chickens scratching around in a yard outside and a dog thumping its plumy tail on a flagstone floor. One journalist had even interviewed them for a feature on ‘Love in the Workplace’ and, on reading the finished article, Frankie ha
d to admit she’d made their working set-up sound cosily idyllic. In reality, they were squeezed into Craig’s fourth-floor ex-council flat on the seamier side of Ladbroke Grove, with a view of the Westway from the window. But it was home.

  Once back at their block, Frankie climbed the stairs, wondering if she should have bought iced coolers rather than steamy hot drinks. There was about one day a year when their flat felt like the perfect temperature, but the rest of the time it was either airless and sweltering, like today, or absolutely freezing, when they’d be forced to work wearing coats and woolly hats like a couple of students.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ she moaned, letting herself back in, feeling unpleasantly clammy. ‘It’s roasting out there.’ And then she stopped because she could hear voices, and she frowned, trying to make out who they were. Craig was fiercely protective of his work time, guarding the scant Fergus-free hours they had as a chance to crack on single-mindedly with a column. Sometimes he wouldn’t even answer the phone to a friend, so determined was he not to be tempted by offers of skiving or distraction.

  ‘Hello?’ Frankie called, wandering through to the kitchen. ‘Oh,’ she said in surprise, seeing an unfamiliar woman at the table. Her brain simultaneously registered two separate facts – one, that the woman looked very relaxed there, leaning expansively against the radiator with her legs crossed at the ankles. The second fact was how much the woman looked like Fergus: the exact same dark curly hair, the same olive skin, the same pretty Cupid’s-bow mouth. And then Frankie’s blood ran quite cold because she knew, without question, that this was surely Julia, Craig’s ex-girlfriend, back from the unknown. ‘Hi,’ she said, her mouth dry, as the visitor gave her an appraising look.

  ‘Hi,’ the woman replied, and for a horrible moment it felt to Frankie as if she were the guest in the situation, that this was still Julia’s flat, and she merely an interloper. No wonder Craig’s ex looked so at home here, lounging against the radiator in that way, when she’d lived here herself for years, long before Frankie had arrived on the scene.