So Bev and I, aka Teddybear, enter into a correspondence. She tells me that she has her own little business, a beauty spa on wheels. She travels around the countryside selling products and offering aromatherapy and make-up sessions. She’s even thinking of starting her own line of body lotions. I picture her in her shiny new Beetle, bought with her husband’s running-away money – the second vehicle, curiously enough, for which I’ve been responsible.
Teddybear tells her that he’s a sucker for a massage – they make me positively purr with pleasure. Twinkletoes replies, I can see you’re a very sensual person, just like me. Lots of Englishmen are so tense; they’re scared of their bodies, aren’t they?
I sit at my computer. The screen says that Twinkletoes is online now. I can almost hear her breathing. It’s the weirdest feeling, knowing she’s sitting there, waiting for my response. For we’re already flirting.
Bev doesn’t hang about. The next email she suggests we meet for a coffee in Ramsgate. I’ll be in that area on Thursday. Say eleven, at Franco’s?
Where’s that? I type.
Sorry, I thought everyone knew Franco’s. Corner of Broad Street and Church Row.
She thinks I’m local, of course. Stupid me, I reply. Franco’s it is. See you there.
Her reply pings in, quick as a flash: Can’t wait!
Have you noticed how people who want to find themselves move west – to Cornwall, to Wales – where there are artists’ colonies and yoga retreats? People who want to escape, however, move east. They have something to run from, something to hide; they’re metaphorically blown there by the prevailing wind and are only halted by the sea – itself suggesting the possibility of further flight. A washed-up coastal town in Kent seems as good a place as any in which to disappear.
And reappear as someone completely different.
I tried to paint my nails this morning but my hands were shaking. On the train, the tea kept spilling when I raised it to my lips. For a moment, I actually thought I was going to be sick.
And now I’ve arrived in Ramsgate. I’ve Googled Franco’s. It’s not far from the seafront. A blustery wind’s blowing and the air is clamorous with gulls. They stand on a concrete wall, big heavy beasts, feet planted apart, eyeing me with hostility. I’ve been to Ramsgate before, when I was young, but I’m still disorientated from last night’s dream where I was in another Ramsgate altogether. With me was a man I didn’t recognize, but I was so fiercely in love with him that I could hardly breathe. He was holding my hand as we walked along the promenade, the waves dashing against the beach. He said I’m taking you to Franco’s and we’ll make love there. When we arrived, Franco’s was a warehouse. Inside it was piled with packing cases. First I’ll give you a present, my darling, he said. He crowbar’d open one of the cases. Inside were rows of gold ingots. Fooled you, he said, and when I turned round he was gone.
In reality Franco’s is an ice-cream parlour and coffee bar. In other circumstances I would admire its art-deco charm. I’m lingering down the road, behind a bus shelter. It’s five to eleven; she won’t be there yet, it would look too eager. And there’s no sign of her yellow Beetle, though of course it could be parked in another street.
The minutes pass. I won’t go in first, of course, because if she saw me sitting there she’d scarper. My mind’s a blank. Maybe snipers feel this, when they’re waiting for their prey. I read the graffiti, scrawled on the shelter, but I don’t take it in. I’m the sniper and Bev is my enemy. Our long adventure has come to this, and the questions I’ve stored up, all these months, have been wiped clean by fear.
It’s starting to rain. A man passes, muttering, holding a newspaper over his head. Two girls come out of Franco’s, look up, and hurry off round the corner. I’m dying for a pee. Bev calls it spending a penny.
By eleven-fifteen I realize she’s not coming. She’s standing me up – she’s standing Teddybear up. She’s had second thoughts. She’s smelt a rat. Or, more likely, she just likes manipulating men. I can twist them around my little finger. Play it mean and keep them keen. She’ll email him later, with a lie, and this will fan the flames of his desire.
Actually, I have no idea why. She’s a murderess. Who knows what goes on in their heads?
At eleven-twenty I give up. She’s escaped me, yet again. I’ll have a coffee and go to the loo and take the train back to London.
So I cross the road and walk down the street, past an amusement arcade and a charity shop, and push open the door of Franco’s.
There’s only a few customers in the café. I hardly bother to look at them as I make my way to the counter.
And then, in the corner, I see her. She’s just a few feet away from me, scrolling through her mobile.
She looks up. There’s a brief pause.
‘Ah,’ she says. If she’s surprised, she’s not showing it. ‘So it’s you.’
Ramsgate, Kent
BEV’S WEARING A powder-blue twinset, surprisingly demure, and her elfin hair is dyed black. She pats the chair beside her. ‘Want a coffee?’
I shake my head and sit down. ‘How did you do it?’ I’m picking up the conversation from a year ago, as if no time has passed. We’re back in the ladies’ toilets, which a moment ago I needed to use. I’ve forgotten about that now.
‘Don’t you want to take off your jacket?’ she asks. ‘You’re soaking.’
I shake my head again. ‘Tell me how you did it.’
She puts away her mobile with a certain reluctance, as if it’s a slight bore that I’m here but she’s determined to be polite. Underneath, surely, her heart is hammering?
‘Insulin jab,’ she says. ‘Undetectable.’
I pause, while this sinks in. ‘I suppose you’d know about stuff like that.’
She nods. ‘He was asleep. And drunk. He didn’t feel a thing.’
‘You put him down like a dog.’
She sighs. ‘Those poor dogs. I still feel guilty.’
I burst out laughing. ‘Christ, Bev!’
The woman’s a psychopath. Nearby, the espresso machine hisses. Another customer has come in and shakes out his umbrella.
My mind races as I try to connect things up. ‘But Jeremy was already ill,’ I say. ‘Did you have something to do with that?’
‘Fiboxin. It’s a muscle relaxant – funnily enough Zonac manufactures it. One of its side-effects are flu-like symptoms.’
‘You’d been feeding him that, so it looked like a real illness?’
Bev nods, her earrings swinging. She seems totally at ease.
‘And you killed him because of me,’ I say.
‘I told you,’ she says, suddenly irritable. ‘If I couldn’t have him, you couldn’t.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Because of the money. I asked him why he’d put all that money into my bank account. Oh, he floundered about a bit but I got it out of him in the end.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said he’d fallen in love with you and wanted to leave me.’
I can’t speak. Jeremy rushes close to me, in all his dearness. His words melt my heart, even though they come from Bev’s mouth.
She drains her cup. ‘I went totally ballistic. You can see why, can’t you, sweetheart?’
‘I’m so sorry.’ I stop, confused. Why am I apologizing?
And yet, in a way I should. My head swims. Bev seems so calm. She’s managed to paint her nails. Of course, she’s dressed herself up for a date. I’ve forgotten about that.
‘You had everything,’ she says. ‘And you had to have my husband too.’
‘What do you mean, everything?’
‘Don’t be daft, you know what I mean.’
‘No I don’t.’
She sighs. ‘You really want me to list them? Like – looks, brains, talent, class, nice loving parents in their nice comfortable house, kids—’
‘You know I’ve had problems with my kids—’
‘You’ve got them!’
‘But you ne
ver wanted any.’
Bev rolls her eyes. ‘You really believed me?’
‘You always said—’
‘I can’t have them! My fallopian tubes are fucked.’
I stare at her. ‘Did you tell Jeremy?’
For the first time, Bev looks uncomfortable. She sits there, twiddling her earring. ‘Not till later.’
‘Till after you were married.’
She doesn’t reply.
‘You tricked him.’
‘So I lied! What do you want to do, throw me in jail?’
I laugh. ‘You’ll be going there anyway.’
She looks at me. The rain has stopped; suddenly the café is flooded with sunlight. ‘If I deserve to go there,’ she says, ‘so do you.’
‘Come on, Bev. It’s hardly in the same league.’
‘It is, to me.’ Her eyes narrow. ‘You’re my best friend and you lied to me.’
‘Yes, and you lied to me!’
The man at the next table turns to look at us. We lower our voices.
‘What I don’t understand,’ I lean towards her, ‘is why you asked me to come and look after you, when you knew what I’d done.’
She considers this. ‘Good question.’
‘Was it just sadism, like pulling the wings off flies?’
‘Oh, it was better than that.’ She gives me a smile. ‘Much better.’
I stare at her. Has she no heart at all?
‘Seriously, I was upset.’ She’s read my mind. ‘You can still grieve for somebody, even when you’ve …’ She glances around. ‘You know …’ She suddenly looks old with exhaustion, a shrunken little elf. ‘I miss him,’ she says. ‘That might sound daft, but I miss him like hell.’
‘Well, so do I.’
My eyes fill with tears. Bev’s face, too, blurs and softens. We can’t start crying in the middle of a café, so I quickly change the subject.
‘What about the poaching?’ I’ve been pondering this, of course, over the months. ‘You made up the whole thing, didn’t you?’
She shrugs. ‘I had to think of something, fast.’
‘Rather unfair on him, wasn’t it? To put it mildly.’
‘Jeremy would never do anything like that,’ she says pompously.
I burst out laughing. Suddenly she’s the loyal wife! I can’t believe this woman.
Bev’s unmoved. ‘Anyway, you fell for it.’
‘Well, you were horribly convincing. How did you know about that place?’
‘Jeremy told me. He used to go off into the bush, camping. He was just a big Boy Scout, really. Sometimes he took Clarence and a couple of the staff. That’s when he discovered the airstrip.’
‘I went there too, actually. When you were away in Cape Town.’
She seems uninterested in this. It’s in the past, irrelevant.
I shake my head in wonderment. ‘I can’t believe you let me think such a terrible thing about him.’
‘Well I did, didn’t I?’ She shrugs. ‘Put yourself in my place.’
‘Oh sure, murdering your husband.’
‘Shh!’ Bev’s eyes dart round the room. Nobody seems to have noticed, however. We’re just two ageing women, meeting for a morning coffee. Women for whom passion is a distant memory.
How little they know. Strangely enough, I feel the old bond thickening between the two of us. The very fact that I’ve ruined Bev’s life, and she’s ruined mine, has drawn us close in a curdled sort of conspiracy.
‘What I’ve been trying to work out,’ I say, ‘is how that man knew the truth. That man in the market.’
‘Me too.’
‘Did Clarence tell him? He didn’t seem surprised.’
‘I wish you hadn’t told Clarence.’
‘He just said are you going to tell the police? So I presumed he knew, but maybe he felt loyal to you.’
‘Listen, Pet. Those people, they know everything about us. They wash our knickers, they hear our rows, they know our secrets better than we do. I never trusted Clarence, always hanging around the market, gossiping.’
‘That’s not fair—’
‘You know nothing, darling. You haven’t lived there. It’s like, they’re on safari and we’re the animals.’
Despite myself, I’m impressed by this analogy. Bev still has the capacity to surprise me.
‘Or maybe somebody was picking through the rubbish,’ she says. ‘They look for stuff – anything – that they can sell. Maybe they found a syringe or something, I don’t know. Maybe word got around and somebody texted, maybe that man read it, that nosey man in the phone booth, who knows?’
How pitiful it sounds – Jeremy’s life reduced to a bag of squashed cartons and empty shampoo bottles, scavenged by starving Africans. I suddenly feel defeated.
Bev’s fiddling with one of her earrings, a multi-coloured plastic bobble which jars with her twinset.
‘Trouble is,’ she suddenly says. ‘You haven’t a clue what it’s like to be poor.’
‘I know, all those people rummaging in our cast-offs—’
‘I don’t mean Africans, dum-dum! I mean me.’ She sighs. ‘I don’t mean being hungry, like them. It’s not obvious, like that. It’s being totally fucking helpless. It’s queuing for the bus, it’s queuing for benefits and then, when you finally get there, it’s them pulling down the shutter because they’re closing for the day. It’s listening to my father coughing his lungs up and then my mother going the same way. It’s living in a flat that leaks and having no fucking privacy. It’s constant, fucking, low-level humiliation.’ She pauses for breath. ‘It’s scraping through the 11-plus and then finding I’m the odd one out, the bottom stream, the one who nobody talks to and who never goes on school trips and doesn’t have a fucking pony—’
‘I never had a pony—’
‘You don’t get it, do you? You’re like, a different species. I was so chuffed to be your friend.’
‘Doesn’t sound like it. Sounds like you resented me.’
‘Oh yeah? And you didn’t patronize me? You’ve always patronized me, all these years. Can you imagine how that feels?’
Bev glares at me. Her skin is too white for that black hair, so obviously dyed; it gives her an odd, stagey look, like an ageing clown. In other circumstances I might have mentioned this. Where our looks were concerned, we were always frank with each other.
‘I didn’t patronize you,’ I say, feebly.
‘That’s a lie. Of course you did.’
Suddenly she scrapes back her chair and gets up. For a moment I think she’s going to do a runner but she grabs my arm.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘You’ve come all this way. Let’s look at the sea.’
We sit on the beach. The tide is out and the distant sea is flat as a mirror. How innocent it looks! Families are eating picnics; children dig up the sand with that focused concentration they’ll soon lose because in a few years they’ll realize what’s the point? Everyone’s doing what everyone does at the seaside; it’s hard to believe that anything traumatic has happened to any of them. Just for now, they’re lulled by the sunshine into a state of holiday amnesia.
Oh Jeremy, I’m so very sorry. How could I have believed those things about you? How could I?
Bev stretches out her legs and I stretch out mine. We’ve kicked off our shoes. Her tiny sandals lie there, dwarfed by my great espadrilles beside them. So much has changed, yet feet never alter. I think of our years together in the flat and our many years before then, years known only to the two of us. Nothing can unravel that. We’re the most unlikely couple, but that’s friendship for you.
Her eyes are closed as she soaks up the sun. ‘So what are you going to do?’ she murmurs. ‘Shop me?’
‘What are you going to do? Kill me?’
We fall silent. The mood has changed. I realize now that neither of us is going to do anything. I also know that we’ll never see each other again.
She rolls over and pulls up her sleeve. ‘Blood-sisters,’ she says. ‘Remember our
pact, from school?’
I take her arm. There’s no scar there, from what I can see, though my eyes are dazzled by the sun. And none on my own arm, with which I’m only too familiar. I offer it for her inspection.
She pinches my skin. ‘How thin it is now,’ she says softly. ‘Mine too, have a feel.’
It’s old woman’s skin, papery and fragile. Blemishes have blossomed on it; mine too … little nicks and bruises that never seem to heal. I have an Elastoplast on one of mine. How have we become so old? It seems to have happened while we weren’t looking.
Bev strokes my Elastoplast with her finger. ‘If it’s any consolation, darling, he said you were the love of his life.’
And then she gets to her feet, picks up her sandals, and is gone.
Epilogue
Beijing, China
Li Jing writes an email to Lorrie.
Dear Mrs Russell,
Blessings on you and your new home. It looks beautiful and you deserve the happiness I am sure it will bring you and your family. In China we perform the Feng Shui Orange Peel Blessing – the words ‘orange’ and ‘good luck’ are similar in our language.
Peel an orange in a bowl of water and sprinkle the water around the doors and windows to remove negativity and enable joy to enter. As you do it, recite the powerful mantra ‘Om Mani Padme Hum’. Make sure your husband is not at home!
My dearest fellow mother, I attach the latest photograph of our blessing and joy.
Your loving Li Jing
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