by Louise Voss
Meredith looked at Ralph and raised her eyebrows. He was the only one who knew about the flowers. She hadn’t told him; he’d seen them. He nodded, briefly.
‘Well … I didn’t think anything of it, but there have been a few things. Last week, for example…’
‘Yes?’ The PC poised his pencil over his pad.
In fact, there had been more than a few things, on and off, in the year since Iain’s call, but they were so small, Meredith hadn’t bothered to mention them. If she did, she’d need to admit why they worried her. And anyway, it was all just tiny stuff: far easier to dismiss as nothing – as her own paranoia: the unopened can of green paint left in her front garden – a visitor could have dumped it there. The bathtub full of cold water she came home from work to find one day – she must have run it herself that morning and forgotten. Things moved around in her living room – must have been her. The fact that she woke up every night screaming and covered in sweat was nothing to do with it, she insisted to herself.
Nothing to worry about. Nobody else apart from Pete had keys to her house. Everything else, apart from her anxiety levels, had remained the same, at least for the next few months. She had kept her head down, carried on working in the shop.
The eighties revival tour happened, without Cohen. Nobody came for her. To her knowledge there had been nothing in the papers, and no reporters had come to the shop.
‘I live on the estate, in a cottage just past the greenhouses. It’s about five minutes’ walk from here. Last week, when I arrived home I saw that … it’s probably nothing … but someone had cut the heads off all my dahlias. I’ve got my own little fenced-off garden in front of the house, but anybody could walk in – to the garden, obviously, not the house. Visitors pass it all the time when they’re walking round the grounds. I just thought it was weird. They were definitely beheaded intentionally; clean cuts, with scissors or secateurs, and the heads were just left lying in the flowerbed, about twenty of them. Every single flower had been cut.’
She felt sick, as if it was only real now that she had admitted it.
‘I see. That is a bit weird,’ agreed the PC, scribbling furiously.
George bristled. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? You should have reported it!’
‘Because, like I said, I just assumed it was a visitor with anger issues, or one of the gardeners having a bad day. Or even a kid, messing around.’
‘That’s vandalism, that is!’
‘Well, in the grand scheme of things I didn’t think it was a major crime.’
Not a major crime, no … but another of those little things that were probably just coincidence. They had to be.
It had been well over twenty years since she’d left the band, and during that time – until Iain’s phone call the year before – Meredith’s paranoia had subsided to a dull roar; most days, anyway. Sometimes, though, she was almost puzzled why nobody ever recognised her, but simultaneously relieved. As Pete always said, though, it was about the context. When she’d been in the band, she’d had black backcombed hair and jumped around stages in black PVC, shrieking into microphones. Now she had short blondish hair, wore Boden dresses and sold beribboned packs of honeycomb brittle and overpriced Minstead House merchandise to Japanese tourists, most of whom were far too young to remember her.
The day of the break-in dragged by without further incident, but Meredith couldn’t settle to anything. It was a big relief when the time came to flip the sign on the door to ‘closed’, and set off through the grounds towards her cottage.
On the far side of the ha-ha, she felt calmed by the sight of the Surrey Hills rising up in the distance, stolid layers of hazy shadow thickening as the sun slid down behind them. It was a balmy June evening and the rolling lawns, a vibrant green after a week of rain, smelled fresh and new as she headed past Lady Wilmington’s grave, planted in solitary state in the middle of a separate grassed area, flanked at the back by box hedges with marble statues in front of them. Lady W had planned it all herself before her death, leaving sketches showing exactly where in the shadow of the house she wanted to be buried, and which statues would be her marble guardians for eternity.
Coming through the archway from the vegetable garden, the sight of her little Victorian cottage’s bottle-green shutters, turreted gables, Gothic-arched front door and barley-sugar-twist chimney pots reassured her even more.
It had just been an accident. No sign of a break-in, nothing stolen. One of the cleaners had probably done it and been too embarrassed to admit it.
She opened the wooden gate and walked up the path. Coming home always felt like she was meeting a friend, she loved her cottage so much. Built in 1879, at the same time as the house, gatehouse and other outbuildings (including the stables, which now housed the shop), historically it had been the residence of generations of gardeners – she was the first non-gardener resident. The Earl had let her rent it since the current head gardener started having children, and his wife wanted to live somewhere less isolated.
Pete always questioned the logic behind living in such a secluded place. ‘You’re lonely,’ he’d say, bluntly, and she always denied it – because, when she was with him, she never did feel lonely. And the rest of the time, it wasn’t loneliness as such; it was paranoia. She only really felt safe once she was sequestered away in her cottage.
As she put the key in the door, she glanced at the bare dahlia plants, their severed heads now brown and rotting into the earth underneath. She had a momentary wobble, then dismissed it again.
Beheaded dahlias and some smashed china didn’t have anything to do with what had gone on before. She was sure of it.
3
Graeme
‘How’s your week been? I brought you some Marlboros…’
Silence. As Graeme slides the cigarettes towards her, he looks nervously across the table at his beloved, whose arms are folded and brows knitted. The black circles beneath her eyes are spreading, the puffy darkness like dual bruises. Catherine ignores the gift.
‘Have I done something to upset you … angel?’
The ‘angel’ is rushed out on fast, feathery breaths, fearing it will be swatted away. A nerve ticks in Catherine’s doughy cheek, pulsing irritation.
‘You look sad,’ says Graeme, trying again, when what he really wants to say is, How can you be sad when we’re together? You are the love of my life, the apple of my eye, the yin to my yang.
He has no idea what yins or yangs actually are. Something to do with seesaws perhaps?
The expression on Catherine’s face is not so much sadness – it’s more bitterness, but all the same, Graeme supposes, it must be hard for his love, watching him walking in and out each week when Catherine herself isn’t allowed to walk anywhere outside of the perimeter fences. Yet. Surely the fact that he visits religiously counts for something? Maybe Catherine doesn’t love him. Maybe these decades of devotion are all a waste of time; maybe their plans and dreams will never come to fruition.
But … they’re getting closer. Catherine’s been good as gold for years – not a foot wrong. And she knows that Graeme would do anything for her.
Anything.
So why can’t she be a bit nicer to him?
Just when Graeme is starting to feel the prickly heat of rejection and paranoia, Catherine raises her head, the effort visible. She reaches across the table and takes his calloused hand.
‘Tell me about our house.’ Finally, she gazes into Graeme’s eyes, and he feels relief flood through him.
He smiles. ‘It’s going to be a cottage, with so much whitewash on the walls that when the sun comes out, it blinds you. We’ll have yellow roses growing up the front walls on either side of the porch – it’ll have one of them little pointy porches with its own roof. We won’t have thatch though – the roofs will be all tiles. I looked into it. You have to renew thatch about every ten years and it costs thousands. Fifteen thou at least, and then you have to get extra insurance and that.’
‘Not thatched
then,’ Catherine agrees, staring intently. Her eyes are brown, with a hazel rim to the irises that Graeme finds hypnotic. Catherine’s thumb begins stroking the web of skin between Graeme’s own thumb and forefinger, and his voice trembles.
‘Veg patch in the back garden with everything in it – not just the boring stuff like carrots and tomatoes. We’ll have rhubarb and parsnips and that posh, pointy green stuff, what’s it called?’
Catherine looks blank.
‘You know. It sticks up through the ground, all of a sudden.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ She looks bored and Graeme panics. He’s lost her, which in his experience can be disastrous.
The word comes to him: ‘Asparagus! You have it in fancy restaurants with butter and that.’
‘Right.’
‘And … and there’ll be dark wood floorboards all through the upstairs. One of them baths with the metal feet that look like animal paws.’
Graeme has an interior-design magazine that he nicked from the doctor’s waiting room. It’s from two years ago and the front cover is missing, but he reads it religiously, holding it like a comfort blanket whenever it seems impossible to think that he and Catherine will ever be together again, that Catherine will ever be released. God knows where they are going to get the money to afford this cottage with its flowers and veg patch and polished floors. Even Graeme realises it’s a far cry from the grim shared flat he’s been living in since his own release. He tucks the magazine in the middle of a pile of bodybuilding magazines by his bed, because every time he gets back from visiting Catherine, something else has been nicked by either the dead-eyed smack addict or the malodorous shoplifter he has to share with. He’s never even set foot in a place like the dream home of his imagination.
‘Claw-foot tub.’
‘That’s the fella. And a big white sink. Fresh flowers in every room.’
‘From our own garden.’
‘Yeah, definitely.’
‘Gym in a shed outside so me doing weights don’t bother you.’
‘Too right. And … nice, non-nosy neighbours.’
Graeme laughs. ‘We can’t arrange that beforehand!’
‘Yes we can,’ Catherine argues. ‘We’ll just be careful. But what if we see our dream house but the neighbours are horrible?’
Graeme frowns, giving this some thought. ‘We’ll vet them first. We won’t let anybody horrible stand in the way of our happiness. And if they do … then they’ll regret it, won’t they?’
Catherine laughs again, looks at her watch then stands up. ‘You’d better go. It’s Cash In the Attic soon and I want to watch it. See you next week. Ta for the fags.’
Graeme feels stricken. He opens his arms for a hug, but Catherine is already waddling away.
4
Meredith
It was after the third mug of Jack Daniels that it all went weird. A moment of sheer madness, the sort when you’re thinking, Oh no, what am I doing? I need to stop right now, but are unable to stop, driven by an almost ghoulish compulsion to see it through to the bitter end, despite the background awareness of the potential consequences.
Ralph was just there, kneeling in front of her in his office. Pissed as a fart, but still a very sexy man – tall and broad and reassuring. More than that, he was sympathetic and – unexpectedly – so flattering and comforting that, in that moment, her body completely disobeyed her brain and conscience, and she was overcome with a great wave of pheromones and whisky-fuelled lust and emotion.
Ralph, her friend and boss. Worse: Ralph, her friend’s husband.
For the first hour everything had been on solid ground. She would have laughed derisively if someone had told her what was about to happen. At work, she was just Meredith From the Shop – solid, reliable Meredith.
At first they had discussed work stuff, albeit in slightly slurred voices. Ralph was rambling on about a newly hired gardener who had apparently lied at interview and therefore got the job under false pretences. Meredith wasn’t really paying attention. She still felt horribly disturbed by the break-in at the shop the day before, and by having to talk to the police.
If only Ralph hadn’t changed the subject and asked what was bothering her. If they hadn’t veered into personal problems territory, it would never have happened.
It wasn’t unusual for Ralph to take an interest in her private life, although they had previously only discussed it when Paula was there too. Meredith’s hapless love life was a well-worn topic that, both Ralph and Paula laughed, they enjoyed vicariously. So she pretended this was what was bothering her now. She couldn’t risk articulating her fears; it would have made her sound paranoid.
‘That bloke Gary dumped me at the weekend, after three weeks. I just have no luck with men at all,’ she pronounced weakly. She’d gone on a few dates with Gary off Tinder, and yes, as dates went, she thought he had potentially been someone she could possibly stand to look at in the morning, maybe even more than once; but Gary had clearly thought otherwise. Perhaps her ambivalence about the whole mating business had slowly leached through her carefully cultivated persona, like armpit sweat through silk.
‘Gary’s an idiot, then. You’re a huge catch,’ Ralph had said staunchly, propelling himself across the room on his office chair and grabbing the bottle of Jack from the top of the filing cabinet. He scooted back with it and replenished his mug. It smelled so good as he poured.
‘Yeah, right.’ She drained her own mug – her second, at that point; she remembered wondering how many he’d had – and Ralph immediately topped her up.
‘Do you know what he said to me? He said, “I’m just not attracted to you enough.”’ She gave a hollow laugh. When she thought about it, though, she had already forgotten what Gary’s face looked like.
‘Then he tried to make it better by saying “It’s not that I don’t fancy you at all, because I kind of do. Just not enough. I’m sorry.”’
‘What a bastard.’ Ralph’s words were slurring a lot more than Meredith’s.
It had stung a bit, if she was honest, that particular rejection. Perhaps it was because she had felt that Gary and she actually did have the chance at a connection. Once or twice, in more optimistic moments, she had let herself think that he might even be ‘the one’. He’d seemed OK – kind, funny, solvent, age-appropriate, sensible, liberal. Nice house, cute dog, matching socks. Four dates, lots of laughs and kisses that started off enthusiastically but – and she hadn’t noticed it at the time – lost commitment as time went on, like a hurricane that gradually blows itself out. Then, finally, his sad words of realisation.
‘He’s not a bastard. That was the problem,’ she said. ‘I’m obviously a terrible kisser. Or I’m just too old and ugly.’
Ralph had laughed, thinking she was joking. ‘Obviously!’ he chuckled drunkenly. ‘I mean, look at you!’
‘I’m serious, Ralph.’ Unexpectedly, she got the tingling in her nostrils that preceded tears and inwardly berated herself. It was almost certainly Jack Daniels-induced. She really didn’t give a shit about Gary, only what he had briefly represented: the chance of a partner, someone to cuddle up on the sofa with, plan holidays with.
Always look at what you have, she reminded herself, not what you’re missing. Although that was more difficult after three mugs of whisky.
Two decades ago, when her band won a BRIT Award for their third million-selling single, she’d have been as horrified as Iain had sounded in that phone call last year to know that this was where she would end up. And now she had talked herself into teariness over a rejection, after four dates, by a guy in his fifties who wore bicycle clips and played bridge.
But she knew that Gary wasn’t the real reason for her distress.
‘You aren’t remotely ugly,’ Ralph finally said, about two minutes past appropriate.
‘I mean, I think I’ve lost my looks since I was younger, but I’d never have said I was ugly.’ Meredith forgot that Gary actually hadn’t ever used that word. �
��My eyes are too close together, I’m too old and I have too many crow’s feet, but really?’
‘I’m sure it’s nothing to do with that. You’re a stunner, even for a woman your age. Especially for a woman your age. Maybe you’ve got bad breath? Paula’s always telling me that I have.’
‘That’s not particularly helpful,’ she said grumpily.
‘Come here, I’ll check. I’m your friend. I’m allowed to tell you these things.’
She started to laugh as Ralph hauled himself out of his chair and lumbered towards her, steadying himself on the edge of his desk on the way.
‘No! Go away!’
He crouched down with difficulty and gently took her chin in his hand, laughing too. ‘Breathe!’ he commanded.
‘Stop it!’ She wriggled away, feeling that moment of euphoric drunkenness where life seems suspended in happiness, like an insect in amber.
Ralph always cheered her up. When the three of them got together on the wine, horseplay and a lot of giggling weren’t unusual. Ralph and Paula’s son, Jackson, now twenty, had witnessed this a couple of times, much to his disgust and opprobrium. This, however, was the first time it had happened without Paula there to be the third corner of the triangle.
Ralph was still squatting at her feet. She had always thought what nice eyes he had – kind, green, and surprisingly clear for a man of his age and prodigious alcohol intake. And despite the undertone of JD, he smelled amazing.
He stopped chuckling and put his palm heavily on her knee as if to haul himself back up. Then he paused. ‘For what it’s worth, Meredith, I think you’re gorgeous. Honestly. I always have.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, smiling. It was the tender affection in Ralph’s voice that made her lean slowly towards him and rest her cheek on the side of his striped shirt. His shoulder felt reassuringly meaty and warm, and she felt his arms encircle her, his chin digging gently into her neck. At that moment he felt like a dad, and her instant response wasn’t remotely sexual.
