Jubilee

by Shelley Harris

  So Sarah knew it wasn’t true, what Colette was saying. But she was saying it anyway, and that could ruin things for Mandy – for both of them. Mandy needed to be warned.

  Sarah found her sitting on her bed in a pair of Love Is pants. Across the floor tops, skirts and trousers were scattered.

  ‘Hi,’ Mandy greeted her. ‘It doesn’t look right. I don’t know what to wear now. Oh! You look nice. The necklace is great.’

  ‘Yeah. Thanks.’ Sarah closed the bedroom door. ‘Listen, Mandy. I’ve just been with Colette. She told me something – well, it’s really silly, but you could still get into trouble over it.’

  Mandy frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘She says – well, you know what she’s like, she’ll say anything – she says she saw you kissing Satish! Kissing! In his bedroom!’

  Mandy’s hands went up to her face, covered her mouth and nose. Over her fingertips, her eyes were wide.

  ‘Oh, no!’ she was saying, and her voice echoed a little in the hollow of her hands.

  ‘I know. What if she says that to someone else? And what if they believe her? Satish!’

  ‘Oh no!’ Mandy said again, and when she took her hands away from her face Sarah could see she was laughing.

  ‘It’s not funny, Mandy. Your parents will kill you!’

  Mandy stopped her giggling. ‘I know. I know they will. It’s not funny.’ Then she smiled again, sheepish.

  ‘She said her dad had seen you, too. What was she talking about? Do you know?’

  Mandy wasn’t smiling now. ‘Her dad saw?’

  ‘She says. What did she mean? Were you at his house or something?’ Sarah had perched next to her friend and was looking solemnly at Mandy: crisis mode.

  Mandy had found something interesting on the quilt cover and was tracing the swirly pattern with her finger. Then she looked up at Sarah again. ‘Oops,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was in his room.’ Mandy stretched across the bed to where a denim skirt lay crumpled, and started to pull it on.

  ‘Why were you in his room?’

  Mandy was still not looking at her, Sarah noticed. She faced away and tugged at the zipper in little jerks. ‘We were just chatting,’ she offered. ‘Just – you know – looking at the street. The decorations.’

  Sarah stood up, listing sideways on her new heels. She went round to plant herself in front of Mandy, stared down into her face.

  ‘With Satish? Just looking at the decorations? With Satish?’ She searched her friend’s expression, tried to find some sense in what she was saying. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just … did.’ Mandy turned away, fumbled in the wardrobe and came out with a white T-shirt. There was something else, thought Sarah.

  ‘Was Colette right? Did you kiss him, then?’

  Mandy dived into the T-shirt. Through the top of it, Sarah could see a circle of dark hair. Her friend stayed inside, pulling the fabric back against her face so that you could make out her nose, her lips, the sockets of her eyes. She nodded.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Sarah shouted. ‘Satish! Bloody hell! Mandy!’

  Mandy emerged. ‘Keep your hair on. So Colette and Mr Brecon saw me. Why should he care? And if Colette tells anyone, no one will believe her, she’s just a kid.’

  ‘She might tell Cai. He might believe her.’

  At this, Mandy sobered slightly. ‘Yeah. I know.’

  ‘Bloody and bugger, Mandy! And yuk anyway. Yuk! Splatish? I bet he smelled horrible.’

  Mandy paused. ‘No, he didn’t, actually.’

  ‘Then I bet he tasted horrible.’

  ‘Not really.’

  Sarah heard movement downstairs, then Mandy’s mum shouting up. ‘Are you girls all right up there?’

  Mandy moved to the bedroom door. ‘Fine, Mum. Just trying on stuff.’ They heard her go back into the kitchen.

  ‘Can’t you see how this could really get you into trouble?’ Sarah asked. ‘Can’t you see how wrong Satish is?’

  ‘He goes round with us.’

  ‘Cai lets him hang around,’ Sarah corrected. ‘But he never, ever plays with him at school. Haven’t you noticed that? At home – well, he lives next door. Cai sort of has to let him come too.’ Then she hesitated. Did he? Why did he? ‘Anyway,’ she rallied. ‘Kissing him! It’s so wrong. Can’t you see that?’

  ‘No.’

  That was absolutely typical.

  ‘Mandy, you’re useless! I have to tell you everything, don’t I? Look at all this!’ Her spread hand took in the posters on Mandy’s walls, the contents of Mandy’s dressing table, the clothes on Mandy’s floor. ‘Your clothes are nice now, and you go round with fun people at school, and you’re friends with Cai, the Chandlers, that lot. It’s been really hard work, helping you do that.’

  ‘Hard work?’

  ‘Yeah. But it’s OK. You go round with us now. What’s going to happen if they find out about this? And what about me? If they think I’m your friend, and they know you’ve done this …’

  She’d hit home, she thought. Mandy walked over to the dressing table and looked down at it, at the bangles and necklaces and the little can of hairspray she’d bought for the party. Sarah moved closer to her, lifted her arm to put it round her friend’s shoulder, but Mandy stepped away.

  ‘So what?’ she said. ‘So what if they know? Why should I care? I like Satish. Satish is fun. He’s a laugh. I like talking to him.’

  Her voice was getting louder and Sarah felt her mouth slacken. This wasn’t the Mandy she knew. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Then she realised – oh my God! – and she moved to the door before delivering her coup de grâce, the blow Mandy wouldn’t recover from.

  ‘You fancy him!’ she told her friend. ‘You fancy him!’

  At last, this seemed to stop Mandy. She opened her mouth, frowning. She gazed across at Satish’s house. Then her face closed off and she got that hard look which meant she wouldn’t see sense.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ she said finally. ‘I do fancy him. I fancy him a lot. I think Satish is brilliant and I don’t care what you think. I don’t care about Cai or Cai’s dad. I don’t care about the Chandlers or any of that lot. And mostly, I don’t care about you.’

  ‘Mandy!’

  ‘Take it and stick it up your bum!’

  When Sarah left Mandy’s house, her first thought was to closet herself in her bedroom for a while and work on some damage limitation. Then she glanced over to the other side of the street, across the long table with its Union Jack covering, the cups and plates in place, ready for the party. It’s pretty, she thought. Opposite her, Satish’s house was unreadable: door shut, windows unoccupied. Then she looked across at Cai’s place, and the Chandlers’. Her eye snagged on something incongruous, a thatch of blond hair poking up from the pavement on the other side of the table. It was Cai, squatting down in front of his garden wall.

  Chapter 16

  It’s the early hours, and Satish is still awake. Maya lies beside him, her breathing shallow, her feet finally warm, resting against his. He’s pushed them away but they keep moving back towards him, and although it’s a complete invasion of his space, if he keeps disturbing her she’ll wake up and require conversation. He’s been staring at the dark shapes of their bedroom: the irregular skyline of Maya’s perfume bottles on the dresser, the lattice at the foot of their iron bed, the wardrobe door slightly ajar, a deeper darkness inside.

  He thinks about the garage, the briefcase, the bottle.

  There is light in here, too; he has had time to take stock of it. Yellow streetlight slides under their blind, and the phone in its cradle emits a blue glow. There’s even – he’s spent several minutes trying to find the source – a circle of white on the ceiling. It must be a reflection of something, only he can’t work out what. And amongst the darkness and the shapes and the light there are his thoughts; they are elliptical, curving away from him then slicing back towards him until he is desperate to sleep, if only to stop them coming. />
  It’s about the diazepam, and his thoughts go something like this: he calls it medicine, a dose, and then he tells himself, come clean – it’s a drug, it’s your drug. He lets himself think in terms of his usage, he risks the word reliance; am I becoming reliant on it, he asks. And then he taunts himself: admit it, it’s an addiction, and then he sends that thought away from him because it’s ridiculous, and when it comes back it has changed, and this time it’s about Colette, and what action to take, and why she’s doing this to him.

  His first thought was to go straight to her and have it out. But that doesn’t make sense yet; he can’t work out why she wants this particular thing so much, why the photograph matters to her enough that she’d blackmail him. It can’t be the money, for this is as precarious and indirect a route to money as he can think of, and troublesome too. It is hard work. The note is cruel (Colette’s not cruel) and underhand (she’s not that, either).

  Maya shifts beside him and he lies still, waiting for her to settle again. Her feet move away. They move back. There’s a thought tapping at him, but he’s batting it away. What if Colette is using again? When you’re using, irrationality is normal, cruelty easy. The blackmail doesn’t make sense if she’s straight. But what if she’s hooked?

  We both are then, he thinks, and this is an utterly unacceptable thought, because he is not like her at all.

  This is unbearable. He needs something else to do.

  Satish has new mail: a message from Colette. It’s short: Cai would love to see Satish – their own reunion, regardless of the photograph. She’s taken the liberty of giving Cai Satish’s number.

  Bloody Colette! All she does is take liberties. Satish can’t think what to do about this new message so he dumps it in his Action folder. It’s all closing in on him. He remembers Sarah, materialising at the hospital.

  Time to take some control. Knowledge is power. There’s nothing you can’t find out on the net, he reminds himself, as he puts her name into a search engine. He types carefully, pressing on the keys, trying to keep the noise down. He knows only her maiden name and there must be a thousand Sarah Millers. He knows nothing about her now, that’s the problem. Or, almost nothing. What was the name of her son? Leo? Leon? God, his memory. Louis. He inputs Sarah Miller Louis and scrolls down, sifting the references. There it is.

  ‘Miller Stevens Productions’, they’ve called their family website. It’s slick, no rough edges, more like a company site than a family one. There’s an extensive gallery devoted to Louis – his birth, his early weeks, various family members cooing over him (is that woman, chic and greying, pearl earrings and a black polo-neck, Sarah’s mum? Is that the formidable Mrs Miller?). There’s a restlessness in Satish’s fingers. He shakes them out, jazz hands over the keyboard. On screen there’s a jump-cut, a sudden leap forward in time, and Louis is six months, seven months. He’s being held by a smiling Sarah outside Satish’s hospital, he’s being fed in a bouncy chair.

  They wouldn’t have operated straight away. And until they did … well, in this gallery there’s no record of what happened. There’s nothing, no pictures of the time in between, when Sarah didn’t know how it was going to turn out. That void is full of bad things, he thinks; parents too scared to take a photograph in case it’s the last one, in case their child dies and his picture waits in the camera, waiting to take them unawares. Satish feels a creep of compassion but pulls back from it. On the homepage there’s a link to ‘our other great collaboration’. He clicks on it.

  Sarah is in PR, it seems, and here’s all the guff you’d expect: she ‘navigates a rapidly changing society’. She ‘engages in two-way conversations with clients’. Had Satish thought about it, this is exactly the future he’d have mapped for her.

  The study feels close around him. There’s no elbow-room. Satish finds himself rolling his shoulders, stretching his arms, trying to get a bit of space. Good, long strides, that’s what he needs, not this cramped little box. Maybe he should go for a walk.

  He thinks of looking up Cai or Peter Brecon, and doesn’t think he can, just yet. Who then? Someone safer. This one’s easy. Satish Patel. UK only. Dr Satish Patel. Dr Satish Patel cardiology. There he is.

  There are so many hits: a conference on paediatric cardiology (Dr Satish Patel presenting on ‘The Physiology of Congenital Heart Defects’), his listing on the Central Children’s website, a cardiac intensive care course (Dr Satish Patel presents on ‘The Blue Baby in A & E’), his listing on the advisory panel of a medical charity (Dr Satish Patel: Cardiac Disorders). This is serious stuff. The references go on to a second page. No need for personal websites or blogs or any of those other vanity projects.

  Some fresh air might help. He leaves his desk, rolls up the blind – quiet, slow – and hefts the sash to shoulder height. There’s a soft thump as it settles.

  This is all he needs: a spring night, the cool of it, and the dark. The road outside is empty and he can lean right out into the dark and breathe, and breathe. Behind him there is comfort, the accumulated evidence of his success: framed qualifications, family photographs, the books and journals he’s contributed to. He can control anything that might threaten these things. He’s done so in the past. Stephen Chandler’s letters, for example. He controlled them.

  They started three years after the Jubilee, long after the Chandlers had gone to live up north. A Manchester postmark landed on his parents’ doormat, giving Satish the terrors. Andrew Ford had made it big by then. It was after the Riot Act cover, after Ford had left the local paper and you could see his photos in the Sunday magazines. That first letter was full of adolescent outrage. How dare he, asked Stephen, how dare Ford make his money off the back of them all? How come they got nothing for it? They should get together, challenge him. They should …

  Satish had torn the letter up, sweating. A year or so after that, he got the second letter, and a few years later, the third. They continued like this, on and off, making their way to Satish from a different town each time. One even came from Australia. Satish was also moving around in these years, of course: to university, to hospital, to a new one, but somehow the letters always found him. He thought they were probably going to other places, as well: to Colette, to Mandy.

  He couldn’t always tell what had prompted them, why they should come now, rather than at any other moment. Sometimes, he could guess. There was an arts programme featuring an interview with Ford at his New York loft. Two weeks later the next letter came. When Ford’s autobiography was published, Satish received another one. As time went by, Stephen’s nebulous fury coalesced into a plan, then reformed into another. His prose veered from vitriol to project management: they would all hire a lawyer; they would launch a class action suit; they would picket an exhibition of Ford’s work.

  Satish had talked himself down: these were just bits of paper. They weren’t Stephen, and Stephen wasn’t about to come for him. He tore them up, every one. Satish controlled them.

  He breathes, and breathes. There were good things about the past, he tells himself. There was Mandy.

  The thought lifts him and he returns to his desk, enters ‘Mandy Hobbes’ in the search engine, and there’s a Mandy Hobbes straightaway, top of the list. It’s something French, a language school: ‘école supérieure de langues étrangères appliquées’ it says, all very trendy, lowercase. The site offers him the choice of French or English text. When he selects English the words fragment into one of those irritating slow intros. He slides the mouse around the screen, searching for a ‘skip’ button, but can’t find one. He wonders whether this really has anything to do with Mandy, his Mandy, and if it does, what turns her life has taken to bring her here. The company offers translation, management training, events and facilitation services. ‘Where do you want to be tomorrow?’ it asks.

  Her name’s there in the ‘people’ list – ‘staff’ being presumably too stodgy – but there’s no photograph. He still doesn’t know if it’s her. This Mandy Hobbes founded the company in 1998. Sh
e could be his Mandy Hobbes; she could be a stranger.

  He searches again: ‘Mandy Hobbes’, ‘Amanda Hobbes’, looking in social networking sites, scrolling through the photographs of American teenagers and hoping he might find her among them. It’s useless. He tries ‘Paris Hobbes blog’ and ‘Mandy Paris blog’, but she’s not there. He searches pictures of people who share her name, closing the pages before the images have fully downloaded. He can see already: they’re all wrong – too young, or too old, their hair the wrong colour. He remembers that hair.

  He looks at the clock on the computer; it’s nearly 3 a.m.

  May as well do Cai. Do it quickly. He finds him straight away, on the Animal World website. Satish clicks on the reference.

  Cai’s mentioned on the Big Cats page. The only pictures here are of animals: a tiger, a jaguar, a pair of lions. Come and meet our playful lion cubs, Harry, Hermione and Ron, the copy urges. Or look in on Tequila, our jaguar. Section head Cai Brecon welcomes you to the world of the big cats, where the wilderness comes to you.

  Wild Cai, prowling Cherry Gardens. You could never guess what he was going to do next. Satish wonders what it’s like for Cai now, handling those fierce creatures. Does he ever feel nervous?

  Satish pages back. There was something else, another complete ‘Cai Brecon’ reference. It’s something unexpected: The Red Bean Boys, they’re called, a Cajun band, operating out of Watford. Cai’s the guitarist, apparently. There’s a bit of video, the band playing Gloucester Cajun Festival. Cai on film.