by Clare Boyd
Paul was a gentle giant. The brawn belied the softness of him. I began to imagine what it would feel like to kiss him. A kiss didn’t have to lead to sex.
‘Did your feelings for Georgie change at all when you had Sylvie?’
‘Nah. I love them the same amount. It’s just a different kind of love. I never get it when kids talk about their stepdads being dicks to them. It’s not right. Just when a kid needs more love than ever, someone else comes along to crush them.’
Paul and I talked about blended families, and about his parents’ divorce, and my parents’ pseudo-hippy dysfunction. None of the ruptures in his life had killed him, or so he believed. They had apparently made him stronger. He had moved on. Everybody had to move on.
I got the impression that Paul was a black and white kind of man. His life was probably full of real-life goodies and real-life baddies, with nobody wishy-washy in between. I wondered where I might fit in. Did losing my husband make me a goody?
I wanted to kiss Paul. He was different to any man I had been with before. He would run into a burning building to rescue me. For now, that was all I needed to know.
When he walked me home, I was a little tipsy and I fantasised about him picking me up in his arms and carrying to me up to my bed.
Of course, men like Paul did not sleep with widows on first dates.
We reached my doorstep. He brushed my wonkily trimmed fringe back, and whispered, ‘Has there been anyone since Robert?’
I shook my head, my chest fluttering. I couldn’t quite say ‘no’.
He kissed me on the lips, gently, briefly, and I wondered if he could taste my lies.
* * *
I backed into a space in the Waitrose car park of the market town of Wisborough. As I turned to look out of my rear window, my heart skipped a beat. Alice’s booster seat was empty. For a split second, distracted by my nerves and full of self-doubt, I had forgotten that I had left her with Paul and his two girls. I wondered whether I was doing the right thing.
The old-fashioned bell of the paint shop jingle-jangled as I entered.
Whilst I waited behind a customer, I had time to admire the interior, which was wood-panelled throughout. I loved it as much as the first time I had been in, when I had bought the hot pink paint for Alice’s bedroom.
A thick oak countertop ran the full width of the narrow space. On the walls, there were rows and rows of black and white paint tins. The sharp, chemical smells belonged to an innocent era of my life. I wanted those smells back. I was daring myself to move on.
The old man behind the till was agonisingly slow at taking the bank card from the customer and slotting it into the machine. His age-spotted, arthritic fingers shook as he typed in the various codes. But when he looked up, to hand the card back to the smartly dressed lady in navy blue slacks, he beamed a wonky, energetic smile and doffed an imaginary flat cap. He had a small face with a large, hooked nose, and very little by way of a chin. His brown eyes were wholesome and bright in his withered, battered face.
‘Goodbye, Mrs Twain. Don’t forget to Whatsapp me a photograph of the finished room.’
‘I’ll get my granddaughter to do it.’ She laughed. ‘See you soon, Archie.’
Archie opened the countertop flap and carried Mrs Twain’s can of paint to the door. The bell tinkled her out.
‘And how can I help you, young lady?’ Archie asked. Over his shirt, he was wearing a black T-shirt with ‘Frieda Kahlo’ in white letters across the front. It made me smile.
‘Hello, Mr Parr, I’m Francesca Tennant. I’ve come about…’
‘Ah, Francesca, yes, about a job. Do follow me.’
I followed Archie Parr through to the back room of the shop, to the mixing room. As I had remembered, it was spacious, and there was a wide, arched picture window that let in streams of sunlight. The low sill was painted in a scarlet red, and covered in sample tins and little squeezy bottles of stainers and pots of pigment powders; and syringes and teaspoons, for the delicate colour-matching alchemy. There were long, mismatched single shelves at various heights, stacked with white plastic tubs of paint. At our feet there was a collection of larger tubs. A low wooden platform, paint-splattered with every colour imaginable, sat in the middle of the room like a stage.
‘Come and sit down here.’ He pointed to the corner behind the door where there was a desk covered in paperwork. I sat down on the wooden school chair next to Archie and stared in awe at the dozens of colour charts above his desk.
‘I collect them.’ He winked, noticing my interest. He studied his collection proudly. ‘This one is from the 1920s. See how tastes have changed?’
‘Ivory. Cream. Grey. Pale blue,’ I read, admiring the simplicity of the range. ‘There aren’t any burnt ochres or warm golds in that range.’
‘Exactly, my dear.’ He nodded, approvingly. ‘Only a few years ago everyone wanted lovely lemon yellows, and now they want deep teals.’
‘I bought a tin of hot pink paint from you a few weeks ago.’
‘Oh, so you were the one Toby told me about! You wanted to mix it yourself, I hear?’
‘Sorry about that.’
‘No, no, how wonderful! We made a few extra tins of it and put it on the counter and they sold out in a week.’
‘Good.’ I beamed. And then I added, ‘I like your T-shirt, by the way.’
‘My daughter bought it for me last Christmas. I’m a feminist, you know,’ he said, proudly.
‘Ha! So am I.’
‘In that case, Francesca, when do you think you’d be able to start?’ he asked, shuffling around some papers on his desk and pulling out a form entitled ‘Employment Form’ that looked more like a raggedy school permissions’ slip.
‘Really?’
‘Your CV suggests you are rather overqualified for the job in one respect, and rather underqualified for it in another. But I think I’ll be able to teach you the retail end of things quite easily, and you might well be able to teach me a thing or two about hot pink?’
‘I would love to.’
‘You know, I don’t pay well, but I absolutely encourage my assistants to take freelance painting and decorating work if you’d like to supplement your income. It’s a lucrative business these days.’
‘Even better, thank you.’
He held out his hand to shake mine, and he crushed my bones with the strength of his grip. ‘Welcome aboard.’
After covering some of the more practical details of the job, he led me back out to the front of the shop. As he dropped the counter, I noticed a stack of Paul’s business cards. Lost in thought, I picked one up and turned it between my fingers, smiling.
‘Got pests, have you?’ Archie asked.
I thought of Camilla.
‘Something like that,’ I replied cryptically, replacing the card.
He grinned, as though he too knew about the Tennants, and we shook hands again, for goodbye.
Emboldened by my successful interview with Archie Parr, hungry and inspired by the warm summer’s afternoon, I wrote Paul a text:
Hi Paul – I got the job! Thanks to you. Just wondering if you would like to meet me with the girls at the pub for lunch? Fran x
As I walked along the pretty high street of Wisborough, I enjoyed the empty pavements and the fresh air. I took time to admire the geraniums and petunias and the Tudor shop fronts. The pace of life was more in keeping with my natural speed setting. This country town and I seemed to suit each other. When I thought of London, I envisaged sped-up people, fast-forwarding through life, darting and dashing, shouting and coughing. Here, I realised I was wandering, pottering, thinking better.
On the way back through the lanes to the pub, I felt relaxed, and, dare I say it, content in my new habitat. I had achieved some great things here. With no help from the Tennants, I had found myself an income and a new friend in Archie Parr, and I was meeting Paul, a potential boyfriend, for lunch. This was progress. This was a life I had never believed I would be allowed again.
Chapter Twenty-Two
John
John opened his laptop and stared at the pill bottle in front of his keyboard.
For some reason, he could not yet type in the relevant search word. Part of him did not want to know about the medication inside.
The months before Robert had committed suicide began swirling around his head. Everything about his death, and the secrets that Robert and his mother might have kept from him – not to mention his own role in Robert’s demise – became a neon, pulsing question mark at the forefront of his mind.
He knocked out a couple of the pills into his hand.
Across the white tablets, the word SEROQUEL was written in capital letters.
He secured the pills back inside the bottle and logged into Twitter; procrastinating, pointlessly flicking down through tweets, which included mildly diverting petitions or Guardian articles about actors, or trailers of new television shows by people he vaguely knew.
Finally, he typed ‘Seroquel’ into his search engine.
The top hit was a blog spot called ‘Seroquel Suicide’.
His stomach hit his throat.
As he read, it became quickly evident that Seroquel was not a brand of sleeping pill, but an anti-psychotic prescribed to sufferers of bipolar disorder. Which happened to be the disorder at the heart of Uncle Ralph’s ‘eccentricities’.
Having been previously doubtful about Francesca’s conjecture, John was now riddled, teaming, shaking with his own suspicions.
He read skittishly, skipping paragraphs, rereading, scrolling down, reading the last blog entries first, and then the middle. Most of the stories were American, about lawsuits involving a slow-release brand of the same generic drug, quetiapine. One mother of four, with bipolar disorder, described her suicide attempt, which she attributed to this particular drug. All the stories of suicide were about people who had been prescribed the medication by their doctors and were taking it regularly.
The more he researched, the more he read about the conditions the drug would cure, or at least manage: the symptoms of bipolar disorder were described over and over. He read about others who suffered like Uncle Ralph, with varying degrees in the seriousness of their symptoms. It seemed Ralph’s condition was at the extreme end.
Having digressed, he decided to go right back to basics. He searched ‘quetiapine’ on Wikipedia. This gave him a useful overview of the drug. It mentioned that it could be prescribed as a sleeping aid.
The new search came up with hundreds of personal blog posts about people who had been given Seroquel as a sleeping pill. A low dosage, under 50mg roughly, seemed to have the desired effect for most patients. They would not experience the severe drowsiness of the higher doses prescribed by practitioners for bipolar or other mental health disorders.
During Robert’s low periods, John had often seen him drowsy, but never slurring his words, as some of the users of Seroquel on higher doses described. Other side effects included dizziness, cold sweats, drooling, weight gain, diabetes and constipation. Some of which Robert could have ticked. Francesca would know more.
After more searching, and many strange tangents, he stumbled across a website called ‘Seroquel Addiction’.
On the opening page, irritability and insomnia were listed as indicators of addiction. John’s heart began running fast. On their advice blog page, there were personal testimonies written by habitual drug users, addicted to pharmaceuticals, abusing the drugs for a high; using ingenious ways to conceal their habit, including some common hiding places: inside lipstick containers, inside gum wrappers, inside prescription bottles with another person’s name on it.
John stared at the worn label of the bottle in front of him. In Robert’s case, it seemed he had used a prescription bottle with his own name on it. The perfect hiding place.
He read on. Some users – or abusers – liked the mellowing, calming effect, while others decided it was only worth it if they pumped it up with some form of stimulant, like an amphetamine or cocaine, to counter the effects and level the taker out. Dozens of similar experiences were written about by desperate addicts, undeniably consistent with Francesca’s description of Robert’s behaviour.
What John read next left him ragged with shock. The most common way of getting hold of pharmaceuticals was either on the internet, or stealing or buying them from patients who had prescriptions.
Patients like Uncle Ralph.
Surely his brother had not been stealing medication from Uncle Ralph.
The horror of this possibility ground through his mind.
No.
John didn’t want to believe it.
Perhaps Uncle Ralph took another brand of anti-psychotic.
Listed online were many different brands of the generic drug quetiapine, and many varied treatments for bipolar. Perhaps Robert had been legitimately prescribed Seroquel as a sleep aid, by a doctor other than Dr Baqri. It was a possibility. A genuine possibility. John wanted to believe this. Anything but settle on the grim, seedy image of his brother sneaking around Uncle Ralph’s house, stealing pills from a sick man to feed his habit.
Anyway, he thought optimistically, nobody visited Uncle Ralph without Camilla Tennant as their chaperone. Their bi-annual afternoon tea ritual as children had been a duty akin to teeth-pulling, orchestrated and enforced by their mother for reasons associated with do-gooding or lessons in those-less-fortunate; similar to the Christmas visits to the elderly care home they had endured as teenagers. Neither John, nor Robert, had a relationship with their uncle autonomously. Over the years, Uncle Ralph had developed a fondness for John, but he had never liked Robert, which made it hard for John to believe that Robert would ever get into the house without his mother’s knowledge.
For now, he pushed aside the question of how Robert might have got hold of the pills, and concluded, with a pang of misery, that his brother had been an addict.
As John let this new knowledge settle into his mind, he returned to his research with a specific focus, and a slower, more methodical pace. He went back over some of the more trusted websites, like the NHS’s and others, to see if suicide might be a universally accepted risk of abuse of the drug. It was, particularly if there was sudden withdrawal. If Robert had been taking them, with or without a prescription, or inconsistently as an addict, the side effects of suicidal ideation would not have been a surprise to any GP or mental health practitioner.
It seemed to John that Francesca, with this pill bottle, had found a key to a door that he had not known was locked. For two years now, the family had been reeling from the trauma of Robert’s death; in denial, too frightened to take a proper look at the reasons for his extreme mood swings, skirting around the root causes of his suicide, fearing his mother’s histrionics. Now, more urgently than ever before, he hungered to find out more, to get under Robert’s skin, to piece his past together. To do this, to get anywhere close to understanding the fuller picture, he needed to start with Seroquel. He needed to find out how Robert got hold of the drug, and whether or not their uncle’s store of medication had been the source.
John stopped scrolling and sat back. Another unwelcome thought was unspooling itself in his head. If Francesca was right, and his mother was involved somehow, he could not risk interrogating her about the brand of Uncle Ralph’s medication. His mother was too cagey, too smart for that. A better strategy would be to pay a visit to Uncle Ralph.
Getting there, without a fuss, would be a challenge. His mother would be suspicious if he suggested visiting his uncle out of the blue, for no apparent reason. But if he used Francesca, who had so far escaped an afternoon tea at Uncle Ralph’s, his mother might buy it. Ironically, this meant that as his mother was the inventor and arbiter of this marking event for all those in the Tennants’ inner circle – into which she had drawn Francesca close, as a reward for her move – if she refused to take Francesca round, John would know, for sure, that she was hiding something.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Francesca
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The large oak tree stretched above the tennis courts, protecting the children from the heat of the sun like a benevolent grandparent. The squeak from the wooden swing in the small playground competed with the poc-poc of the balls hitting the rackets. Woollen fibres from the rug on which I was sitting scratched through my shorts.
I looked out for both John’s Land Rover and Paul’s pickup truck.
To distract myself, I tried to focus on the delicate pinpricks of wild flowers dotted across the meadow that spread down the hill in front of me. The beauty of my surroundings was restful, but when a dog barked behind me I jumped as though I had heard a gunshot.
John’s text had seemed urgent. Or had it? Was I reading between the lines, as I had the habit of doing, lately? I didn’t trust myself any more. I read it again:
Fran, are you around today? John
I had replied:
I’ll be on the green after tennis club. F x
But I had not mentioned Paul. Why had I not mentioned him? How I regretted that now.
Paul and his girls appeared from behind me. Paul kissed me on the cheek, resting his hands heavily on my shoulders. ‘Hello.’
‘Hi, Francesca,’ Georgie said, standing above me, staring at me with an expression on her face that suggested she thought I was strange.
I felt self-conscious of my dress. It was possibly too floral, too summery, too girly, too trying-too-hard.
‘You look pretty,’ Sylvie said, standing next to her sister.
‘Hello, girls. Alice and the others will be finished in about ten minutes. Fancy some lemonade?’
Paul rolled out his rug, lay flat on his back and splayed his legs and arms out.
‘How was last night?’ I asked, pouring the girls their drinks.
