What I Did On My Holidays

by Chrissie Manby

  ‘Whatever. Shall we have some music?’ Clare asked.

  ‘Quietly,’ I said. ‘We don’t want to disturb the neighbours.’

  ‘No one will be around at this time. They’re all at work or school.’

  They weren’t.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked someone from the other side of the fence moments later.

  We were being observed. I’d had the sense that we were being watched for some time but had not mentioned it to Clare for fear that she might give me one of her speeches about ‘presences’. There was, however, no spirit-world mystery here. Two very real small faces peered over the top of the fence at us. It was my neighbour’s children, the ones who fought every morning over the DS or some other toy. The children I had never seen but often heard. Now they scrabbled to get a good view of me and my sister. I wondered what they were standing on. The fence was pretty high.

  ‘That’s a big sandpit,’ said one.

  ‘It is.’ Clare grinned. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s excellent. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sandpit that big. Except in the park.’

  ‘Can we come and play in it?’ asked the smaller child.

  ‘Of course,’ said Clare, before I had the chance to raise an objection.

  ‘You’ll have to ask your mother first,’ I piped up.

  ‘It’s OK,’ came an adult voice from the other side of the fence. ‘You can keep them for as long as you like. I’ll bring them to the front door if you’re serious.’

  ‘I’ll get my spade!’ shrieked the little one with such joy that if we weren’t serious before, we had to be now. How could we disappoint a couple of children?

  Less than a minute later, we heard the doorbell ring and, for the first time since I had moved into the flat almost three years before, I found myself face to face with my neighbour.

  ‘Rosie,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘And this is Sally.’ She indicated the smaller child, a poppet with her hair in cornrows. ‘And this is Dex.’

  ‘Short for Dexter,’ he told us proudly. ‘Did you know that?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Clare.

  Clare waved them in. Rosie came too. I thought that was for the best since I did not want to be left in charge of two children I had known for less than a minute. As we walked through, Rosie murmured politely about the pictures on the walls.

  ‘Have you lived here long?’ she asked.

  ‘Three years,’ I said, more than a little embarrassed.

  ‘Me too. But people don’t talk to their neighbours much in London, eh? I’m sorry we haven’t been introduced before and now my children are all over your . . .’

  ‘Beach,’ said Clare to save her searching for the word. ‘It’s Sophie’s birthday beach.’

  ‘It’s your birthday?’ Sally’s head popped up. The magic ‘b’ word never fails to attract a child’s attention.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘Are you having a cake?’ Sally asked.

  ‘If someone makes it.’

  ‘I’m no good at cooking.’ Clare shrugged. ‘Are you? Maybe you could make a sand cake instead?’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ said Dexter.

  Clare was already welcoming the children onto the sand. They threw themselves into the task of building a sandcastle with glee.

  ‘This is like being on holiday!’ Sally cried out in delight. ‘Except there’s no sea. We’ve got a paddling pool next door. Can we bring it over? Can we, please?’

  ‘It’s got a hole in it,’ Rosie reminded her.

  ‘I’m sure we can fix that,’ said Clare.

  ‘All right,’ said Rosie. ‘If you’re sure.’

  Clare looked at me. Alongside her, Sally and Dex adopted puppy-dog expressions. Really, what choice did I have?

  While I made sure the children didn’t get squashed, Clare and Rosie heaved the paddling pool over the fence. Unfolded, it took up what tiny space remained in the backyard, squashed right up against the wall, and filling it took for ever. There were more leaks in the rubber than we had suspected and we used up a whole roll of duct tape patching it up, but eventually it was watertight and had about two inches of water in the bottom. The children were delighted. I had to admit that it looked pretty authentic when the sunlight shone on the pool, accentuating the bright Mediterranean blue. Just the sight of it gave me more of a jolt of energy than I would have imagined possible. It was as though that blue awakened some part of my brain that had been asleep since the trip to Crete.

  Sally and Dexter provided the perfect holiday soundtrack with their shouts of glee and the splashing of water. Around one o’clock, Rosie popped back next door for half an hour and returned with a fabulous picnic, which was extremely welcome after our week on bread and cheese and a variety of frozen foods. All the tastes of summer were there: cucumber and fresh tomatoes from Rosie’s garden, strawberries and raspberries, sprigs of fresh mint pulled from a pot on her kitchen windowsill.

  ‘We need something to go with this,’ said Clare. She completed the holiday taste-track with a jug of sangria, using up the last bottle of rough Italian red from the cupboard beneath the stairs.

  ‘Weak sangria. Very weak,’ she lied. I could tell from the first sip that it was a headache in the making. It tasted great, though.

  We three adults lay back on the sand. The yard was a suntrap and looking up at the sun, with the sound of the children and the scent of cucumber, strawberries and sangria, we really might have been somewhere much more exciting than Clapham.

  ‘This is so kind of you,’ said Rosie, ‘but tell me, why did you guys decide to put sand in the back garden, instead of, you know, potted plants and stuff like that?’

  I looked at Clare.

  ‘It’s Sophie’s birthday present but it’s also an art project,’ she said, sticking to her story. ‘I’m planning to do a degree in art and I need to create an installation for my portfolio.’

  ‘Ah.’

  She gave Rosie the speech she had given the guys from the builder’s merchants earlier that day.

  ‘I studied art,’ she said, ‘and I think your urban beach is a really nice idea. You’ll wow the admissions tutors. I don’t know why more people don’t have them.’

  Clare beamed at the confirmation that someone else believed she should give art a try. How little I knew about my sister, I thought, as she outlined to Rosie the steps she had already taken to change the direction of her life. I recalled her having been quite good at drawing when we were children, but I had no idea that she had wanted to take an art course upon leaving school but had been discouraged by her teachers and steered towards a more sensible option.

  ‘That’s ended up with me doing a job I hate for the money,’ she sighed.

  ‘But one day you might be recreating this beach in the Tate Modern,’ said Rosie.

  Rosie had plenty of advice for my sister and the more she talked, the more I regretted not having made her acquaintance before. This must happen all over London, I thought, people with so much in common living next door to one another but never knowing, sitting indoors chatting to virtual friends when a real friend is really so close. I liked Rosie enormously, and the children I had only known as tantrums heard through a thin wall were in reality so sweet and delightful it didn’t seem possible they were the same kids. That day, both children were at home because their school was closed for a teacher-training day. Rosie looked tired. I had guessed from the sounds that came through the wall that Rosie and the children were on their own. She confirmed that their father was living on the other side of town.

  ‘Oh, he left when Sally was three months old,’ she said.

  That put my dumping in perspective a little. At least Callum had only left me with a couple of unused plane tickets.

  ‘I don’t think I could cope in your situation,’ I said.

  ‘You just do. You’d be surprised. You just keep getting up in the morning and eventually it doesn’t feel so bad.’

  Was it really as
simple as that?

  Sally drew a picture of me in my pink beach kaftan. She gave me a triangular body with the points in all the wrong places, but I was delighted. My legs, which were two straight lines, looked great.

  Clare took a photograph of Rosie and her children sitting on the sand with my bright birthday windbreak behind them to hide the grey fence.

  ‘I wonder . . . It’s a bit cheeky of me to ask,’ said Rosie, ‘but the thing is, I’m not going to be able to take the children away this summer. I wonder if I could sometimes bring them to your beach while you’re out at work. I could maybe plant some herbs for you in return. They’d do well. You get lots of sun on that back wall.’

  How could I refuse?

  ‘That sounds like a great idea,’ I said.

  Sally and Dexter cheered.

  For a couple of hours I managed not to think about Callum at all.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Later, with the children gone indoors to do their homework, accompanied by much grumbling, Clare and I lay back in our deckchairs and watched a few fluffy little clouds drift across the sky. We tried to work out where the planes that flew overhead were coming from or going to.

  ‘Las Vegas,’ Clare claimed a Jumbo.

  ‘Edinburgh,’ I claimed a smaller plane heading north.

  ‘Tokyo,’ Clare murmured. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Tokyo. It looks so interesting.’

  ‘You could go on your honeymoon,’ I suggested.

  ‘Fat chance. Not in the budget. We’ll be in a tent in Wales if we go anywhere at all. Evan’s austerity measures make the government look spendthrift.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like much fun.’

  ‘It isn’t. Every penny has to be accounted for.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s good that Evan takes charge of the finances. You were never that hot on figures.’ I stopped short of reminding Clare of the times I’d subbed her in the past.

  ‘He won’t give me a chance to find out if I’ve improved.’

  I could only imagine what he would say when he saw the sand and the deckchairs on Clare’s credit-card statement. When they first started going out, Clare had seemed pleased that Evan helped her work out a plan to repay the enormous debt she had built up while buying herself out of the post-Jake doldrums with weekly visits to Harvey Nics. Now she was debt-free and the part-owner of a house. She couldn’t have done it without Evan’s thrifty approach. Still, I suppose it was dull to have to justify every little expenditure. I nodded along to Clare’s lament that she hadn’t bought a new pair of shoes in three months. I wondered if she would ever find enough time to wear the shoes she already had.

  For the rest of the afternoon we chatted and dreamed and dozed. Mostly dozed. Clare’s ‘really weak’ sangria had gone to both our heads. In fact, I was asleep when Clare squeezed my arm and asked, ‘Is that smoke coming out of that window?’

  ‘Hmm?’ I couldn’t see anything.

  ‘Up there?’ She pointed to the open window on the floor above my own kitchen window. ‘That’s definitely smoke.’

  Clare wasn’t imagining things. When I focused at last on the right window, a breeze pulled the net curtains out through the opening, sucking with them a black cloud almost as big as the jolly white ones we had been watching.

  ‘Oh my God.’ I sat up.

  ‘Who lives up there?’

  ‘An old lady.’

  ‘An old lady?’

  ‘I have no idea who she is,’ I had to admit.

  ‘Well, whoever it is, her flat is on fire.’

  ‘Maybe she’s just burned something in the kitchen.’

  ‘She must be a very bad cook.’

  I just stared, dopey from the alcohol. Clare, however, scrambled for her phone and was quickly dialling 999. There was, she had realised, no time to lose, and even as she was talking to the fire service, she was filling the buckets the children had left behind with sand. She strode through my kitchen, looking impressively competent, and barked at me to soak a couple of tea towels as I followed her. Then she was out of my front door and on her way up the stairs.

  As soon as we got into the hallway, the smell of burning was unmistakable. Reaching the first-floor landing at warp speed, Clare hammered on the door. There was no answer. She rattled the handle. No give. The door was locked. I suggested it was possible that there was no one inside. Maybe the old woman had left a slice of bread in the toaster and gone shopping. Old people could be forgetful, couldn’t they? In truth, as I watched the smoke that was now curling under the door, I was feeling scared by what we might find. I wanted the whole thing to be a bad dream.

  ‘It might be safer,’ I suggested, ‘to wait for the professionals.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ said Clare. ‘God knows when they’ll get here. And every second we leave it is a second closer to your flat catching fire too.’

  Maybe it was adrenaline. Maybe it was the sangria. Maybe it was the thought of potentially losing all her copious luggage. Clare would not be diverted. Next thing I knew, she had kicked a hole in the bottom panel. The door gave way as though it were made of polystyrene. Clare snaked her hand up through the gap she had made and pulled down the interior handle. The door swung open easily.

  ‘We could have a career as burglars,’ Clare found a second to joke.

  What a way to meet your neighbours, I thought, hoping we hadn’t just busted our way into a crack den where the residents were perfectly happy with their black smoke, thank you very much. There was an awful lot of black smoke. I put my hand across my mouth. What next? We couldn’t actually go in there, could we?

  Clare didn’t hesitate. She pressed one of the damp tea towels to her face and ventured inside. If she could do it . . . I took a deep breath and followed suit.

  Clare was right. The old lady who lived in the flat was inside. She lay on the floor in the kitchen. On the stove top was the cause of all the smoke. A chip pan burned like an oil tanker. Without really thinking, I threw my wet tea towel over it, smothering the flames. Who would have thought that a trick our mother had made us learn twenty years earlier – after Clare’s kitchen disaster at our parents’ house – would ever come in handy again? Who would have thought that people still used chip pans? Clare turned her attention to the net curtains, which had been blown inwards from the open window and caught alight. I had no idea what to do with those. Clare, thank goodness, did. Shoving her hand into an oven glove, she ripped the curtains down and threw them onto the tiled floor. She smothered the flames in the sand from my birthday beach and stamped on top of the whole mess until she was sure the fire was out.

  Thank God, the fire was all smoke and no real damage – it had spread no further than the curtains – but there was still a casualty to deal with. My neighbour – to whom I had failed to introduce myself so many times – was unconscious, but age and ill health had left her as light as a dried rose. I tucked my hands under her armpits, while Clare took her feet. We weren’t sure we should move her at all, but the smoke in the kitchen was acrid and choking, so we carried her into the living room and lay her in the recovery position on a shag-pile rug that was the colour of an old Labrador. She showed no sign of consciousness as we moved her.

  ‘Is she breathing?’ I asked.

  Clare put her ear near the old woman’s mouth. ‘Just about,’ she said.

  ‘Do you think she was overcome by the smoke?’

  ‘I think she probably passed out beforehand, leaving the chips to catch light. There would have been more damage the other way round.’

  ‘What should we do?’

  ‘I don’t know now. The ambulance is coming.’

  Clare and I sat at either end of the woman’s body, anxiously watching the rise and fall of her birdlike chest. Satisfied that she was at least still breathing, my gaze drifted around her flat. There were framed photographs everywhere, mainly of school-age children with haircuts that suggested the 1980s. I wondered where they were now that they had grown up. Clare studied the photograph
s too.

  ‘That one looks familiar,’ she said, pointing at the picture of a young boy with red hair and no front teeth. ‘He looks like that weatherman. That one Mum follows on Twitter.’

  I peered at the photograph. I didn’t risk picking it up, in case my poor neighbour woke up to find herself in the recovery position while two strange young women went through her belongings, but, yes, I agreed with my sister, he looked very much like the chap who presented the weather on the regional station where we had grown up. He was one of Mum’s unlikeliest crushes. Dad said that he blamed the menopause. Prior to that, she’d had sensible crushes, like George Clooney.

  ‘There’s a claim to fame,’ said Clare. ‘Living downstairs from the weatherman’s relative.’

  ‘Assuming she makes it,’ I said.

  Clare put a finger to her lips. ‘Sophie, have some tact. She might be able to hear. She’s going to make it.’

  Out loud, I agreed, but I didn’t think that either of us was particularly convinced. Still we gave each other the thumbs-up over the woman’s sleeping body. The effects of the sangria were long gone. I had never felt quite so sober in my life as I did right then.

  The fire brigade arrived a long, anxious minute or so later, sirens blaring. They were quickly followed by the paramedics. I let them into the house. Half the road had come out to watch the show.

  Clare and I drifted into the background as the paramedics got to work, briskly and professionally. They didn’t seem overly worried. They’d seen it all before. They clamped an oxygen mask to my neighbour’s face and strapped her onto a stretcher for the trip downstairs.

  ‘She should be fine,’ one of the paramedics assured me.

  ‘How about you, ladies?’ asked his good-looking companion. ‘Do you think you inhaled any smoke?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but you could check my chest,’ said Clare with a grin that turned me crimson with shame.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  How strange London life is. The sound of the sirens had brought almost everyone who lived on the street out onto the pavement. Here were the people who lived and ate and slept just feet away from me, yet I knew not a single one of them except for Rosie and her children, and I had known them for only an afternoon. I learned, as my neighbour was carried to the ambulance by the two paramedics, that she was called Emma Kenman.