by Fiona Walker
*
‘Is that you, Carly, love?’ Janine called sleepily.
‘Armed burglar.’ She found her sister-in-law prone on the sofa, every cushion from the room propped up behind her head, a bowl of crisps on her chest, eyes glued to the television.
‘I’ve still got three episodes of Hannibal to go.’
‘Don’t mind me.’
‘What’ve you done to your lovely nails?’
‘Long story. I need a bath.’
‘You’ll have to ask Ash to budge up. Been in there ages – I reckon he’s been in a fight.’ She straightened up, crisps tipping out. ‘Shit, it wasn’t you, was it?’
Carly hurried upstairs, grateful the lock on the bathroom door was still broken from Ellis getting stuck in there. The main light was off, gloomy grey rays from the shaving strip meeting the orange glow of the streetlamp outside.
He was under the surface of the water, skin a muscular bone-pale canvas of distorted tattoos. ‘Oh, Christ! Ash! Ash!’ She stumbled across the room. His hair was long enough to grab and she yanked his heavy head up.
He loomed from the water with a great splash. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
‘I thought you’d – I thought—’
‘I was rinsing my bloody hair!’
‘Shit! Sorry!’
Slicking his hair back with red-knuckled hands, he stared at her, silver eyes huge, lashes divided and jewel-tipped. ‘You thought what?’
He had a cut beside his right eye and his lip was thickening.
‘Have you been in a fight?’
‘It’s from clearing the tree earlier.’
‘When I said goodbye, you didn’t have all the face-work.’
His tongue ran over his teeth as an ironic smile lifted his battered cheeks. ‘You thought I’d topped myself, didn’t you?’
‘No!’ She perched on the side of the bath, reaching out to touch his sore lip, her fingers numb with sudden warmth. ‘I’m just worried about you, Ash. I know I pissed you off tonight. I shouldn’t have made you do it, not like that.’
‘Hey, bae, it’s all good. You did me a favour.’ He put his fingers over hers and drew them away from his face. ‘I got these brands reading out some rules. Turners don’t like being bossed around, but it’s about time someone took charge round here. It’s what Granddad wants.’
Carly swallowed uncomfortably. Norm had more fighting scars than an elephant seal, not to mention having half a left ear and a finger missing. Just what had she goaded him into?
‘Now make yourself useful and soap this.’ He pulled her hand down below the water. ‘I honoured the deal, remember?’
Whatever Carly had triggered, it had made him stand to attention more rigidly than he had in weeks.
*
Having been trapped next to the noisiest cubicle in A and E for ten minutes, then led to one of the treatment rooms to be stitched, Ronnie was well aware of the celebrity drama going on, but the nurse was eager to fill in the junior doctor stitching her, so she was forced to relive it again, summarised in a broad Birmingham accent.
‘So Greta the Vampire demands to be taken to a private clinic and Dr Cameron is like “This isn’t America, you can’t just transfer healthcare provider like a hotel,” because he wants her to stay here so he can show off to all his friends. But Dr Obeikwu says, no, it’s cool, he’ll just make a call because he knows the admissions guy at the Grove, and we all know how much they charge, and before you know it their ambulance is on its way here and she’s telling her old rocker of a sugar-daddy – Gavin in Bloods reckons he was in some band called Marillion – to get her weekend bag from an abandoned car because there’s a face cream in it that cost two hundred dollars and without it her skin shrivels up, which I suppose it would if you’re a vampire. And Sugar-daddy says, in front of everybody, “For two hundred dollars I’d expect it to have its own bloody chauffeur.” Excuse my language. Are you all right there, love?’
‘Fine.’ Ronnie gritted her teeth because it hurt like hell, but at least the commentary had a numbing effect, like white noise.
She tuned it out, too disenchanted by Kit Donne to want to remember his long-suffering acerbity as the smoky-voiced starlet called him her grumpy Brit and wrapped him round her little finger. It disappointed rather than surprised her that Hermia’s latest replacement was barely in her thirties – she’d had enough experience of older men in her thirties to know how that one worked. It was what he’d told her about Hermia that played over and over in her mind, not matching with the story she knew.
Ronnie and Hermia had regularly gone through long periods of not writing in their twenties and thirties, their friendship like a pair of shoes that could live in the wardrobe for months unworn, then walk, run and dance fifty miles in a week. Her friend’s accident had happened during one of the uncommunicative phases, coinciding with the slow and demoralising end of Ronnie’s relationship with married lover Lion, and Hermia being busy with her young family.
The first she’d heard of any accident was her father saying, almost in passing, that Hermia had taken a fall – a silly slip-up on the road, he’d called it – and been concussed. She’d sent a card commiserating. A few weeks later, having heard nothing back, she’d sent one of her customary catch-up letters, several pages long and full of months’ worth of news, mostly rather gloomy and not all of it casting her in a good light. The short note that had come back from Hermia explained that she was very busy and suggested that their lives had moved on, so perhaps it was best their correspondence cease. Shocked, Ronnie had seen it as a judgement on her very ragged lifestyle, not for a moment imagining any personal struggle might lie behind it. She’d given things time to settle and written again, several times, but the only things to come back were the Christmas and birthday cards they traditionally exchanged, and which Hermia was always better at remembering. Eventually, those stopped too, Ronnie living on the Continent for many years, sending occasional rushed postcards promising letters she never had time to write. It was only when she’d come back to England five years ago that she’d learned to her dismay of Hermia’s death. A brain haemorrhage, her father had told her, in one of their rare, stilted telephone conversations, unapologetic that he hadn’t thought to mention it at the time: ‘Been a bit peculiar for years,’ was his summary, ‘not her bubbly self. Nobody saw much of her.’
Now she knew the truth of it, she knew exactly why Hermia had written the note to her, and it was heartbreaking.
‘Mr Vane asked me to give you this.’ The nurse handed Ronnie his private consultancy card with a knowing look. On the back he’d written, ‘Call me, Teapot,’ with a smiley face.
Reacquainted with her blood-stained clothes, which made her look as if she’d been in a shoot-out, Ronnie was discharged and sent back through a packed waiting room, Hurricane Claudia’s battered victims queuing to be patched up. She stood despondently in a line for the pay-phone, hoping Blair was all right. He’d been so heroic trying to get her out. Did he even know she was here?
The line wasn’t getting any shorter, so many smartphones waterlogged or out of battery that the old-fashioned wire was a life-saver and taxi-hailer. Feeling her tobacco tin in her pocket, she headed outside, binning Mr Vane’s card on the way.
The sky was clear, the faintest bright spot visible in the light-polluted city sky as Venus made her annual return. Ronnie gave her a grateful nod, in need of some love. She walked to the far edge of the water-logged set-down area and perched on a low retaining wall to roll a cigarette beside a gaggle of fellow smokers. When she looked up from striking it, she saw a skull and recognised Kit Donne impatiently scanning the cars coming and going. A taxi swept in through the puddles and he rushed forwards only to be shooed away by the Indian family who had booked it. Turning away furiously, he spotted her watching him and stalked across.
‘I ordered a cab bloody ages ago.’ He perched beside her, as though their brief acquaintance in adversity lent them a cantankerous camaraderie.
&
nbsp; ‘Bad luck.’ She didn’t share the sentiment, just the crankiness.
‘May I beg a cigarette?’
‘They’re roll-ups.’
‘My favourites after Gitanes, Woodbines and crack.’
She rolled him one, handing it across with a lighter.
He kept it in his hand after lighting up, sparking it like a Catherine wheel. ‘This was the hospital we came to after Hermia’s accident.’
‘That must be hard.’
‘I’ve always been grateful to it. They saved her life. At least, I used to be grateful.’
He smoked like Hermia, that distinctive cosmopolitan pluck punctuating speech. It made Ronnie warm to him slightly, imagining him and Hermia sitting outside a London pub in the sun when they’d first got together, smoking Silk Cut and having animated conversations about Pinter or Stoppard.
‘Her head injury was among the worst the neurologist had seen in his twenty-year career.’
‘I had no idea it was that bad.’
‘For weeks we didn’t know if she would live or die. Surely someone told you.’
She shook her head. ‘Nobody from the village ever spoke to me, apart from Hermia. And my father, of course, but he downplayed it totally. He probably didn’t really take it in. The stud was always his little empire, the village its hinterland. He was terribly self-obsessed.’
Kit’s eyes watched her face intently. ‘Must run in the family.’
‘Ouch.’ She winced, taking her lighter back, the sparks irritating her.
‘You stopped writing to Hermia.’
‘She asked me to.’
‘It took her ten minutes to write a side of A4 by hand before she had the fall, a day to type three lines on a computer afterwards. When you got a letter from my wife to say she didn’t want you to write to her any more, it didn’t occur to you that she might want just the opposite?’
‘She meant it. There was a very good reason.’
‘Enlighten me.’
Ronnie’s eyes fixed on an ambulance setting off, the siren starting up as it joined the public road. What was she supposed to say? ‘My God, what a coincidence! You’ll never guess what?’ Hermia, who had once read straight between the lines of those jolly letters to Ronnie’s years of guilt and frustration living with Angus after his accident, had wanted to protect her friend from any repeat of it. She said nothing, a suffocating fist of love and anger pressing hard against her windpipe. You stupid, darling, stupid, kind, stupid, tender woman. I’d have come back. I’d have come straight back.
Outwardly, she relit her damp roll-up and watched the cars coming and going.
When he realised he wasn’t going to get an answer, Kit turned to glare at the building behind them. ‘She was in here for months. Even when we did get her back – what little of her we got back – her personality had completely changed. She could learn to walk, to talk after a fashion, to write slowly and even very occasionally to laugh again. She absolutely loved Father Ted. But she couldn’t learn to love us all as she once had. It’s so hard on children to find that unconditional love has a condition after all. It’s called TBI, traumatic brain injury. She tried her heart out, but she was so frightened all the time, and in such a dark place, that often she protected us by withdrawing. It was like living with a ghost. I used to be grateful to this hospital for saving her life, now I’m not so sure. Maybe she died that day after all and just haunted us.’
‘She protected you by withdrawing.’ Ronnie echoed the phrase quietly to herself. ‘She didn’t want to hurt me either.’
‘Hurt you by what? Needing you? She loved those bloody letters of yours!’ When angry, he sounded more Cumbrian. ‘She reread them endlessly, and all the hundreds you’d sent from school. Those were the other times we saw her smile and laugh. She always looked out for more, but they came so rarely.’
‘I didn’t know you’d moved. I sent them to the wrong address. For years, I sent them to the wrong address.’
‘She got every single letter, Ronnie. The postman brought the ones addressed to the farm. She asked me to send you things – poetry, photographs, always hoping for more. I could have told her a woman who abandons her own children isn’t going to think twice about abandoning her friend.’
‘I can’t believe you just said that!’
‘It’s true, though, isn’t it? You never came back to the village to visit your children, let alone Hermia.’
‘I bloody well did, but that was before you moved there from London – and it was so awful always with Johnny that it was easier do it around their schools once they all boarded. After Johnny died, it was a long time before my parents wanted to set eyes on me again. I came back once – it can’t have been long after Hermia’s accident. I was going to call to see her, and if I had, perhaps this awful misunderstanding wouldn’t have lasted, but I made a stupid, stupid mistake. I had to leave.’
‘And now you’re still riding round with your married prairie cowboy when you should be coming back and facing up to your responsibilities.’
‘Christ, where did all this come from?’
‘It’s what the villagers were saying earlier while we were pulling all that bloody timber off you.’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t just leave me in there and set light to me as a witch. And who made you my judge, dressed like Bon Jovi, shagging someone who wasn’t even born when your illustrious career was taking off?’
‘I’m so flattered you’ve followed my illustrious career and love life.’
‘I used to take enormous pleasure in both because they made someone I loved very happy.’
‘You didn’t love her. People like you are emotionally impotent, Ronnie.’
‘I’ll love who I fucking well like!’ She stood up furiously, noticing for the first time that they had attracted quite a crowd, several of whom were filming them with smartphones.
Pushing through it came a figure in a long, battered coat, two overexcited dogs on leads eyeing up ankles to bite. His voice was as deep as a dry well. ‘Does that include me?’
‘Blair!’ She rushed to him, flooded with relief and gratitude.
‘Let’s not hang about. I’m parked across two lanes of the ring road. Pip’s telling everyone there are police horses on board ready to guard the city shops against hurricane looters.’
Kit watched them go. You will love her. You heard her: she’ll love who she fucking well likes.
As they disappeared through the ranks of cars, his taxi rolled up. ‘Sorry, I’m late, brother. Some bloody div’s brought a bloody great circus wagon into town.’
‘Bring on the clowns.’ He got in.
*
‘Sorry, brother.’ Ten minutes later the taxi driver was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as they crawled along a B road behind a large horsebox. ‘Looks like we’re stuck behind this the rest of the way, unless they’ll pull over to let us past.’ He flashed his lights and tooted the horn.
‘Honestly, it’s fine,’ Kit muttered, sliding sideways into the door with a sudden jolt as the driver swung out and tried to overtake. ‘Shit!’
The taxi pulled back just in time to avoid an oncoming car. ‘Fucking cheek! You see that? Gave me the finger out of the window from both sides. I’m taking this bastard on.’
‘Really – just leave it. I’ve tried that one and you’ll only regret it.’
Part 5
SHOOTING PEGS, TRICK OR TREAT, BONFIRES
37
The trees were shaking out burnished leaves, a drift of gold and bronze butterflies through which the Saddle Bags trotted as they hacked along the raised spine of Drover’s Wood. Last night’s frost hung on the air, the spiders’ silk strands across the track in front of them crystallised, like jewelled VIP ropes. The sun was rising behind them, their shadows long, outriders weaving between the trunks and dark hollows in which Hallowe’en monsters lurked.
The Redhead, unridden for at least a month, was on high alert. Petra struggled to sit out the spooks, soft-bottom
ed from long hours in a swivel chair while her imagination was the only active thing about her. Six weeks’ antisocial labour was in cloud storage for half-term, full-on family life bringing her down to earth with a bump, her horse trying hard to join in.
‘Oof!’ She hung onto a hunk of chestnut mane on as they leaped away from a pheasant rising out of the undergrowth with a squawking flap.
‘One Charlie missed last week,’ Gill pointed out.
‘He missed most of them, didn’t he?’ Mo chuckled.
‘Charlie’s alive?’ Bridge teased.
‘He held his own at the Manor Farm shoot,’ Petra said loyally. ‘It was Wilf who held everyone else’s. He picked up more birds than a lad’s night out. Charlie’s sending him back to gundog school. Argh!’ She found herself sitting on the back of the saddle as the Redhead plunged past a suspicious-looking clump of bracken at whiplash speed.
‘What about your secret admirer?’ demanded Bridge, laughing as the nervous Connemara followed suit. ‘Was Bay smouldering at you between drives?’
‘Hardly secret,’ snorted Gill.
‘We didn’t see much of him.’ Petra wriggled back into the saddle, breath pluming in front of her. ‘His cousin was the one meeting and greeting. Bay and Monique looked in at elevenses.’ She shivered at the memory of the latter’s cryogenic small-talk. ‘They were off to Newbury races.’
Accompanying Charlie shooting the previous weekend had been a labour of love, coming hard on the heels of an all-night writing shift, their neglected children farmed out to friends. ‘Bad form on a neighbour’s private day, if you’re not there to help pick up,’ Charlie had insisted, then ignored her throughout, a bitterly cold waiting marathon interspersed with wrestling dead game birds out of Wilf’s jaws. Their absent host’s kiss on the cheek and whispered ‘You look good enough to eat, Mrs Gunn,’ had kept Petra warm all afternoon, standing behind the guns with the fur-trimmed wives and girlfriends, grateful that her husband’s peg was at the furthest end so she could avoid all the competitive muttering about charity balls and common entrance, and nobody could hear Charlie’s unsportsmanlike whinging about low birds. Yawning a lot, she’d daydreamed about what to do next with Father Willy, a warm brand on her cheek where Bay’s lips had been.
