by Daisy Tate
Kev needed her. That was why. Needed her for the all-important female demographic. The married female demographic. Besides, there was no one else idiotic enough to put up with his self-aggrandising, sexist shenanigans but her. She popped on her camera-ready smile.
The producer cued her that they were five seconds out.
‘Everyone ready?’ She beamed at the camera crew, most of whom had been giving her the evils all morning. A playing field at one of Birmingham’s poorest schools wasn’t really their thing. She could see where they were coming from. Usually she was over the moon when they attracted a crowd. Today? Not so much.
Fola was trying his best to get the lads to be as quiet as the boys on his team were, but in a matter of seconds he would have the full glare of the BND cameras on him as well. Cuffing someone round the ear, if that was his tactic, wasn’t really going to curry favour with the viewers.
‘Miss! Do you want see my penis?’
‘Miss! Miss! Are you going to make me famous, Miss?’
‘And now that we’re all safe in the knowledge that a couple of sexy cha-cha-chas will burn off that too-good-to-resist banoffee pie—’
Kev’s voice needled through her earpiece and constricted round her heart.
‘Miss! Are you giving away prizes? I’ve got no money, Miss. You look minted!’
‘… let’s join our Kath who’s gone out into the elements today to drum up some support for her cycle ride. Hello, darling. How is it out there amongst Britain’s finest?’
A particularly gritty looking pre-teen began marching in front of the assembled footballers throwing his arm out Hitler style whilst singing ‘God Save The Queen’.
Fola had him up and out of there in seconds (scruff of the neck), but not before the cameras had turned red and they were live on air.
The ease with which the story had been approved suddenly made sense.
This was Kev throwing her to the wolves. Watching her drown in her own sea of good intentions.
Kev: One
Kath: Nil
Right then, darling. Bring it on. The scoreboard was about to change.
Incident No: 120912
Time of Call: 11:42
Call Handler: SUNITA ‘RAVEN’ CHAKRABARTI
Call Handler: You’re through to the NHS 111 service, my name’s Raven and I’m a health advisor. Are you calling about yourself or someone else?
Caller: I’m calling for myself.
Call Handler: May I have your name please?
Caller: I’d prefer not to.
Call Handler: Umm, okay. It does make it a bit easier if I know your name.
Caller: It’s too bleeding embarrassing, alright? Can you handle that? That I feel embarrassed. That it took all my bloody courage to call you and tell you that I’ve effed up a perfectly gorgeous vagina?
Call Handler: I’m sorry, I – are you calling for yourself?
Caller: No, sorry. I just—[Muted swearing and female voice] I put popping candy up it.
Call Handler: Up …???
Caller: Up her vagina. We were having sex and I thought I’d, you know, spice things up, so I went down on her with a load of popping candy on my tongue and … what’s that, love? Sorry. She wants me to tell you it’s burning with volcanic heat and itching like the world’s worst yeast infection. She can’t think straight. Can you send a doctor out please? The GP’s not open and she says she can’t make it to A&E. She’s not in a good way.
Call Handler: Could I have her name please?
Caller: No.
Call Handler: I’m afraid I need her name, sir.
Caller: You didn’t need mine.
Call Handler: I was trying to get yours, but you started telling me what was wrong with your wife’s—
Caller: She’s not my bleeding wife, alright? That’s why we need the doctor here. Can you understand that? I don’t need the fuss of an ambulance. She’s refusing to let me take her to the A&E. She’s in massive pain, needs a doctor and wants it kept quiet, so could you please just make it happen so I can end this whole sordid— no, love. Not you. You’re not sordid. You’re— wait! Wait!!! Stephanie, love! I wasn’t saying you were sordid! [Call ends]
Chapter Thirty-Six
‘It’s not like it’ll go away if I don’t look.’ Sue sent Raven a pleading look, willing her to magic life back to the way it had once been. Predictable. Safe.
Raven tilted her head to the side, saying nothing and everything with the small gesture. You need to confront your reality.
Which was fair enough. They’d got themselves all psyched up to go bicycle shopping (Halfords, just to get an idea) when Sue remembered she didn’t have any money.
‘What if it’s all invoices?’ Raven said after taking a sip of tea. ‘Payments owing to you … and Gary,’ she added. ‘That box was pretty full.’
‘It could be all bills.’
‘There’s really only one way to find out.’ Raven pointed her finger up at the ceiling. ‘I’ll do it with you.’ She gave her phone a jiggle. ‘Easy as one-two-three to download a bookkeeping app.’
Raven was right. Whatever was in those boxes needed looking at. And in all honesty, it would be much, much easier with a friend.
Before she could change her mind, Sue put down her cup of tea and headed for the stairs.
Unpaid. Unpaid. Unpaid and … what was … hmmm … half an invoice with a note to find a receipt for a u-bend. All of it in Gary’s dodgy penmanship. Sue’s heart skipped a beat as her eyes lit on the bottom of yet another tea-mug stained invoice. There was a note to pick up some chicken balls with hot and sour sauce and a fried rice with a heart next to it. Sue felt her heart break as she went back in time to remember the day. They only had chicken balls and sweet and sour sauce when Sue wasn’t feeling well. Her ‘pick-me-up takeaway’, Gary called it.
She ran her finger along the edge of the paper. The date on the invoice was two years old. And just like that, it came to her. Mostly because she didn’t get sick that often, but also because of how Gary had made her laugh and laugh, so much so, some fried rice had come out of her nose.
She hadn’t been working at the call centre yet. She’d been at a handbag boutique in Bicester Village after her receptionist’s job at a dental office had been taken over by the dentist’s wife. Her Bicester boss had been a horrid woman. A bully really. Victoria Langham-Smoots. A woman who could not have stuffed more plums in her mouth if she’d tried, Gary used to say. Plummy and impatient. On this particular day, Victoria had sent Sue home when she’d appeared for work red-eyed and pink-nosed with a seasonal cold she’d picked up from her niece and nephew. Victoria had denied her entry to the shop, announcing loudly that she didn’t want someone ‘filled with contagion infecting the products’, as if the handbags had been vulnerable aboriginals unable to resist chicken pox or measles. Gary had been furious. Threatened to drive across, leaving a power shower job half done to have a word, but Sue had begged him not to (she did hate a fuss) and later that day, Victoria had rung to say she’d found someone more invested in the business and not to worry about coming in again. That night Gary had brought her a pick-me-up takeaway.
She put the paper back in the box and closed her eyes.
This was too much. A bit like going through their wedding photos, but worse, because all of this paperwork, this history, was something they hadn’t shared.
‘You alright?’ Raven asked.
‘Sorry, I just—’ She shook her head at the piles of paperwork, then gave Raven what she hoped was a grateful smile. ‘You’re so kind to do this with me.’
‘Not a problem,’ said Raven, making a pointy gesture at the invoice Sue had just set down. She handed it across, Raven squinted at it, scanned the top of it with her phone, then put it in a different pile.
No more pick-me-up takeaway nights for Sue.
‘Sue?’ Raven awkwardly crossed her legs into a sort of yogi position. ‘Do you want to take a break? Pop the telly on or something?’
‘Oh,
no. Not at all. Unless you want to. Whatever you want is perfect, but I’m fine. This is fine. It’s all fine.’ Sue was talking blithering nonsense, of course. She’d actually been feeling as if cement was being poured through her body. Suffocation by insight.
‘Would you be happier if your brother was helping you with all of this?’
‘What? Dean? No, why would I want Dean to help me?’
‘Err … because he’s an accountant?’
Yes, that was true, but Dean was also married to Katie and Sue wasn’t ready for Katie to know about this. Or, god forbid, her mum.
It’ll all end in tears, Suey. All end in tears …
Sue bumbled around for an explanation that touched on some sort of truth, ‘I mean, you’re right in a way. Dean was an accountant, but now he’s in accountancy recruitment, so … this probably isn’t his thing.’
Raven chewed on her lip. ‘He might have a better idea of what to do. Like, how to get everyone to pay up, or resubmit or something. I don’t know if you can invoice for work that’s been done years back.’
‘Oh, no,’ Sue protested. ‘You’re doing a brilliant job. I never knew you could do so much on a little app.’ She was amazed, actually. Ten seconds to find the app, five to download it and off they’d gone. What a difference a clued-in teenager makes.
They’d started out with the tables turned, of course. Sue setting the first box down and giving it a firm look. But when her hand had begun shaking as she lifted the very first invoice scrawled in Gary’s scratchy handwriting, Raven had taken the lead. Two evenings they’d been at it, now. Absorbing, untangling, filing, trying their best to divine what on earth had been going through her Gary’s mind, not just on that last day, but over the last three years. It was how far back the paperwork went. To just about the point where his father had passed.
That had definitely been a rough patch. Reg had been a brilliant father-in-law, but he’d never had a good run of things. Parents gone too early. Straight to work at fifteen. Married young. Divorced young. Gary had moved in with him after his mother had swanned off to Australia with a nouvelle cuisine chef she’d met at Bicester village back when it first opened. All this and yet Reg, much like his son, had always been one of those chipper chappies. Whistling while he worked. Washing up the mugs from the endless cups of tea his customers made him. Proudly telling everyone he met that his boy was going to take over the business he’d built for him. He’d had such a struggle with his cancer in the end. His second wife, Nadine, falling to bits as he, too, fell to bits. His body betraying him in cruel ways. He’d begged them in the end. Begged Gary and Sue to bring him to the Netherlands or Switzerland. Wherever they could make it all stop. The hospice people had taken over then. It was why Gary had done the 10k for them not even two days after the funeral. He hadn’t trained at all. Just signed up and ran. They couldn’t have done it without them, those lovely women from the hospice. Managing the physical pain against the emotional.
Anyway.
Sue wasn’t ready for her family to know that managing the finances for Young & Son’s Plumbing had been quite the problem. Up until he’d died, Reg had always done it, but Sue had presumed they’d done some sort of handover across the years. She’d been sure of it, in fact. The morning her Gary had knelt by his dad’s bed tearfully swearing he’d make Young and Son’s the best damn plumbing business Britain had ever seen, or Oxfordshire at least, had been a powerful one.
Unfortunately, it appeared Gary hadn’t had much of a way with numbers. When they first started going through the paperwork, Raven had gently asked if he had suffered from dyslexia. Sue had said no, dyslexia wasn’t really something children had when they were young. Not at their school anyway. They just got on with it. Failed school or passed it. Went to work if it had been the former. Went to college if it had been the latter and then went to work. Indoors, usually. But Gary’s future had been laid out for him. He was a born plumber. End of.
Sue watched as Raven tucked a blue carbon sheet under the next invoice and re-totted up yet another set of Gary’s mismatched numbers before putting the real figures into the app. (The dyslexia diagnosis was seeming more and more likely if Sue was being honest.)
She caught herself smiling at the book. Then frowning. The duplicate invoice booklet was one of a dozen or so that had a) clearly lived in the footwell of Gary’s work van and b) been bought back when Reg ran the business.
Sue remembered Reg crowing about bulk buying them when the stationer on the high street went out of business some … gosh … was it ten years back? Reg had always loved a bargain. When they’d lost him three years ago it had been a blow and a release. A blow because he’d truly been loved. A release because, though he’d never put words to it, her Gary had never felt a proper man with his father ‘running the show’ and Reg was not the type to retire. Gary’d never been grumbly about it, but Sue knew he had been chomping at the bit to make his own mark in the world. Prove her parents wrong. Get them to finally treat him with the same respect as they did ‘our Katie.’
Had Gary taken his life because the man he’d hoped to be and the man he’d turned out to be hadn’t matched? It surely, surely couldn’t have been over a bit of ketchup.
Sue shoved the thought straight back into the increasingly full cupboard of questions she lacked the fortitude to ask and gave her shoulders a little shake. Today was about facts and figures. Not speculation.
Raven readjusted her reading specs, pushed her lips forward in a dark lippy moue and stuffed a pencil in her messy topknot. She was looking very official. More steampunk than the goth look she tended to favour. Perhaps it was the absence of eyeshadow. She’d gone for simple eyeliner with flicks at the corners today. The look leant her an added maturity. It was that or the businesslike manner with which she’d approached their task. Wise beyond her nineteen years. Her parents must be so very proud of her.
She held her phone over the recalculated invoice, waited until it had been scanned then raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s over twenty-grand he’s owed so far.’
The breath left Sue’s body.
‘And how much do we owe the vendors?’
Vendors. She’d never used that word before yesterday afternoon. Raven was full of them. Vendors, payees, accounts receivable, accounts owing. Learnt them all at her mother’s elbow, she said. Helping at the pharmacy since she was young. The most Sue’s mother had taught her was that marriage was nothing more than a disappointment unless, of course, you were ambitious like Katie and Dean.
Raven thumbed across a couple of pages on her phone. ‘About four grand. You’re owed about twenty going three or four years back if you include the bills from when your father-in-law got sick. And you owe about four which, if everyone pays … would leave you with sixteen. There’s the VAT returns to do as well if he was VAT registered. Do you know if he was?’
Sue shook her head. ‘Why would he have needed that?’ She’d never really talked to him about the nuts and bolts of his business. Only the funny stories, really. Like the time he’d saved a squirrel blocking someone’s toilet. They’d giggled about that for ages. The smile faded from her lips as she began to tune back into what Raven was saying.
‘… although it’s not obligatory if it’s under, you have to be VAT registered if you earn over eighty-five thousand—’ She stopped when she saw Sue’s face crumple. Gary definitely wouldn’t have needed to register for VAT.
All of which meant, if everyone paid up, Sue would have sixteen thousand pounds.
And then a few more pieces shifted into place.
Sixteen thousand pounds was what their joint savings had been. An account they’d been scraping together for their retirement or a house upgrade (whichever came first). He must’ve been using it to pay off the bills to protect her from the fact he was falling behind on the paperwork and then when that had run out and the money owing began building up …
Sue tried swallowing against the lump in her throat but couldn’t. Her poor, lovely, kind, sweet
Gary. Not wanting her to worry.
Snippets of conversations they’d had over the years came back to her as, systematically, Sue and Raven got back to work sorting through the piles of paperwork
‘GarBear?’ She used to call him GarBear when he was in a grump about something. Her own little grizzly. ‘What’s all of the swearing for up there? Anything I can help with?’
‘No, Suey. You’re all right. Let’s pop out for a film shall we? Or a drink down The Oak? I’ve done more than enough scribbling for one night.’
‘Gaz?’ He was Gaz if she was concerned but didn’t want him to know. ‘Everything alright? Need a cuppa?’
‘Right as rain. I might head down to the pub and watch the footie with the lads. Finish this lot of paperwork up after. That alright?’
She shivered as her skin remembered the touch of his calloused hands after he’d slide down the banister and pull her into a hug. No. No. She wasn’t ready for this. She wasn’t ready at all.
‘Why don’t we pop the telly on and watch something silly, eh? Celebrity Bake Off’s on.’ Sue loved Bake Off. It was so gentle and sweet. People getting into a sweat over their mille feuille. It was adorable.
‘But – we’ve barely started,’ Raven pointed at the stacks of papers Sue had refused to let her decant from the boxes.
‘That’s enough for today.’ Sue said, suddenly desperately wishing they’d left the boxes exactly where they were. ‘You know,’ she said, flicking on the telly even though Raven didn’t seem keen. ‘Now that we’re getting such a large amount of money, why don’t you call that friend of yours? Dylan, was it? The one who can get the deal on the bikes. The least I could do after all of this is get your bicycle. It’s March already and if we’re going to support Flo, we’ve got to get training.’
‘Ummm …’ Raven looked down at the notepad she’d been using to make notes in and began sketching something out with one of her coloured pencils as a flush crept onto her cheeks. ‘Sue,’ she said, eyes still glued to her notebook. ‘You know you have to ask people for the money, right? That it won’t just … you know … go into your bank account.’
