by Judy Astley
‘I’ll have a think about Dad,’ Mel said as she briefly kissed her mother’s powdery cheek. ‘I’ll ask him if I can come to the pub with him one day and see what he’s up to. Perhaps he’d just like a bit of time to himself.’
‘To himself? Whatever for?’ Gwen said as she opened the front door to see her daughter off the premises. ‘You get plenty of time to yourself when you’re widowed. It’s not something you go looking for, Melanie, you’ll find that out for yourself one day.’
It was cold in the aircraft’s Club Class section, which cancelled out any extra comfort that the legroom and not-bad food gave. Roger could swear there was a freezing draught whistling in from the window beside him. Leonora slept peacefully, stretched out beneath her airline blanket as if she was in the best kind of bed. In fact, he thought, as he checked his watch for the hundredth time, for the price of this upgrade he could have bought a bloody excellent top-of-the-range mattress.
The cold Atlantic blast was aiming at his left calf and making him shiver. Roger wasn’t a happy flier at the best of times, always expecting the big tin tube to give in to gravity and plummet to earth. He could see drops of something (not rain, could it be rain?) trickling down the wall beside him. This couldn’t be right, surely the plane should be completely sealed? He wondered about calling the stewardess, but was terrified that these small wet drops really were a cause for concern. He could imagine the stewardess’s panic-stricken shriek, all the passengers waking, the shouting, the confusion, the praying – the end. Definitely if he made a fuss they’d crash. If he ignored this, the plane would fly on. Whether he said something or not, though, there shouldn’t be little gaps where the outside could let itself in. Suppose something gave way under the pressure. Wouldn’t they all be sucked out? He tightened his seat belt, then felt under Leonora’s blanket to make sure hers was secure. The stewardess, catching sight of his hidden hand snaking across her body, gave him an uncertain little smile. Let her think what she liked: he was too old to explain himself away.
Leonora smiled in her sleep, content, confident, sure of her happy future. Roger, meanwhile, twitched his feet up and down, rotated his ankles, went on to worry about deep vein thrombosis and about whether he really should have eaten the chicken risotto that now lay so heavily in his stomach. Most of all, though, he worried about whether the plane’s oxygen supply was enough for the fragile growing baby, because, as he (and Mel) knew too well, there were things that could go catastrophically wrong and, as Leonora’s pregnancy advanced, it seemed more and more to Roger as if with this extra chance of producing a little life, fate was being teased and tempted. With wicked disloyalty, he wished Melanie was next to him right now. Not as a replacement for Leonora, but just to talk to about all the worry-things. She’d know whether it was all right about the leaky plane, that was for sure. If she took one quick look and said, ‘Condensation,’ that’s exactly what it would be. If she said, ‘Hmm, not sure,’ he’d worry on. You knew where you were with Mel. He hoped, he really hoped, as he looked at Leonora’s smooth young trusting face, that he’d manage to know where he was without her.
The trouble with working late was that sleep wasn’t as easy to come by as when you packed up earlier and gave yourself several hours to loosen the brain. On nights like this, when Mel’s head was still buzzing at 2 a.m. with the work she’d just finished, she could quite see the point of proper office hours. She realized, as she lay in bed staring at the shadows on the ceiling, that she shouldn’t have gone to bed straight after the cheese and pickle sandwich. If it was true, as her mother had always said, that cheese last thing at night gave you nightmares, she wouldn’t mind at least getting to sleep so that she could put the theory to the test.
It should have been the quietest part of the night, too. Instead she could hear the distant whoopings of a group of revellers who must have managed to persuade some unlucky pub landlord to host a lock-in. There was the special night-time traffic as well: she could hear the rhythmic whine and clunk of the bin wagon collecting rubbish from the back of the shops and restaurants on the main road a couple of streets away. And along with them was the metallic clanging of heavy-load trolleys delivering to the fast-food restaurant at the end of that same block.
The whooping gang were getting nearer. Melanie tensed as she heard glass breaking, somewhere at the far end of the road near the lane that led to the river. There’d be graffiti by morning too, she guessed: some indecipherable teenage tag scrawled on a house-side, applied with far more speed than artistry.
Mel turned the pillow over to cool her head, lay on her side and tried to settle. Thoughts about Tina Keen still raced around her brain. There could, she thought, be a way of using these early-hours rubbish collections to find her way to the killer. Mel herself wasn’t yet sure who’d done it. She preferred to use the Ruth Rendell method of plot formation: if she knew from the start who the culprit was, a reader could work it out too. It made the job more interesting, but definitely tiring. Sometimes she envied writers who had every chapter mapped out, complete with character sketches and plot summaries. It would be like having a good map to follow in a country you’d never visited. The way she worked, she just had to rely on instinct and a reasonable sense of direction.
The whooping gang were quite close now. She put her hands over her ears and tried to shut them out. She could smell the lavender water she’d sprinkled on her pillow, and wondered if its soporific qualities had possibly been exaggerated. But then she’d defy any herbal tincture to lull away the new sound of a car screaming at full throttle down the lane. It sounded mildly familiar, even being over-revved. A Golf, she identified, at last feeling mildly dreamy.
A Golf? Her Golf had been parked in front of the house, in its usual place just under the chestnut tree. Wearily, knowing exactly what she’d find, Mel climbed out of bed and went to the window. ‘Oh, great,’ she murmured as she dialled 999. ‘Bloody frigging great.’
‘We don’t usually come out for cars.’ The large gingery sergeant, who looked as if retirement wasn’t that far off, accepted a third biscuit and stretched his legs out under the kitchen table. Melanie assumed she was to feel privileged.
‘So why did you?’ she asked.
‘Well obviously it’s because you’re on your own, love. We have to check you’re not unduly distressed, or that there’s not something else you haven’t felt able to mention.’ Ginger sounded like a patient teacher, going over something for the fiftieth time with a bunch of trying pupils.
‘Like what? There isn’t anything else, it’s just the car that was stolen.’ Melanie, having waited well over an hour for the honour of this police presence, was more than ready for sleep now but felt she should make the most of the visit’s research possibilities. She knew plenty (definitely a lot more than the average citizen would want to know) about police procedures and protocol, but the real-life character traits had to be grasped as and when.
Sergeant Ginger gave her a bless-your-sweet-innocence smile and explained, ‘Well, your car might have been taken by an abusing partner. You could be covered in bruises and not finding it easy to divulge the real problem.’
‘Yes, but, well I appreciate all that but truly, as you can see, I’m fine. The car was just taken. I was just trying to get to sleep at the time.’
‘Even so.’ Ginger Plod sipped at his well-cooled tea. ‘Crime is always a shock. Do you have anyone you could get to come and stay with you? What about a neighbour? Boyfriend? Best pal?’ He looked as if he rather hoped she’d fall sobbing to the floor. He had a kind, round, placid face. She hoped he wasn’t disappointed by his job – he looked as if when he’d joined the force he’d given ‘Helping People’ as his main reason for doing so on the application form. His shoes were wonderfully polished, as if compensating for the laxity of discipline in the modern cop.
She smiled at him, hoping to express thanks for his concern along with reassurance that she didn’t need it. The cat came rattling through the catflap and although it was te
mpting to say she was going to cuddle up in bed soon with Jeremy Paxman, she no longer had the energy for explaining the joke.
‘I’ll be fine, really. And please, I don’t need Victim Support or counselling – I know it’s always offered, but it would be wasted on me. It’s not as if I’ve suffered . . .’
The policeman gave her a disbelieving look. ‘Everyone’s suffered, one way or another,’ he declared as he stood up. ‘The trick is to admit it.’ He put on his cap and headed for the door. ‘There’s such a thing as being too independent, you know,’ were his parting words. Mel thought how very like her mother he sounded, promised she’d bear it in mind, then went rather crossly back to bed, falling into a deep sleep just as she was wondering where the hell her insurance details were.
Five
Being eighty-one (or thereabouts) didn’t stop Mrs Jenkins being an early riser. She liked to be up and ready to greet the postman, always opening the door to take in her mail as if her letter box had been sealed up or she was protecting the poor man’s fingers from her poodle’s savage teeth. Often she was disappointed – too frequently he cycled on past without even junk mail to deliver, not so much as a pizza menu or an invitation to take out a bank loan. She liked to be waiting on the step, though, just in case there was something from Brenda in Canada. And when there was, as today, when an autumn breeze wafted in through her open door and chilled her vein-knobbled legs beneath her old plaid dressing gown, she needed to know immediately what the news was from her daughter, so she stepped over the low wall and knocked hard on Melanie’s door.
‘It’s seven o’clock!’ Melanie yawned, wrapping her robe tightly round her against the cool, damp air. This counted as more of an interrupted night than an early morning and was to be grudged, even to a needy neighbour. After the previous week, when the car had been stolen, she’d gone into a kind of jet lag without the fun of travel. It was becoming a routine, working late and then staying up for a good relaxing while, well into the early hours, flicking through cable-TV films to find the ones she’d missed first time round. She’d also started to make her way through the red wine that Roger had told her was definitely not for drinking yet (so when? Suppose they died first?) and ate bizarre sandwiches from whatever was left in the fridge. The night before had been salami, artichoke hearts from a jar whose sell-by date she now wished she’d checked, topped off with tomato and a couple of slices of mozzarella. Cheese, she’d found, did not give her bad dreams. Only the thought that Roger might resume his habit of loading her with his life’s minor hiccups caused her to half-wake in the night. She could have solved this by switching off the phone, but there was Rosa in Plymouth to consider and the rest of the family too – the moment she was out of contact there would be sure to be some dreadful emergency. She could just imagine Vanessa, tight-lipped outside a hospital ward, hissing accusingly, ‘We did try to phone you . . .’ as if instead of innocently sleeping she’d been out on the town, having careless rampant sex with a coked-up young stockbroker newly trawled from Stabbers nightclub out in EC-something. This morbid worst-case dreamscape was completed by her mother, pale and sorrowing in the background, clutching a poignant black bin bag containing her freshly dead husband’s clothes, his watch, four back teeth (on a plate that had click-clacked and never really fitted), signet ring and the loose change that always weighed down his left trouser pocket.
‘I’ve had a letter, dear.’ Mrs Jenkins tottered past Melanie and made her way straight to the kitchen, where she sat down at the table and ripped open the envelope. She held out the pages to Melanie and looked across at the kettle.
‘Cup of tea?’ Mel asked, obediently.
‘Thank you dear, and if you’ve got any bread I wouldn’t mind a slice of toast to go with it. Whatever it is in tea, it needs something to mop it up or it’s funny on the insides.’
‘OK, toast it is then.’ Melanie cut a couple of slices of her favourite rough-hewn wholemeal and hoped it wasn’t too challenging for Mrs Jenkins’s tender ‘insides’.
Mrs Jenkins’s daughter Brenda had strangely old-fashioned handwriting. It was spiky and slanted keenly to the left, like wind-battered trees struggling to survive in coastal areas. Mel could imagine Brenda at school in the 1960s, being told off in Handwriting Practice for the exaggerated backward slope, the almost apologetically undersized script, for not rounding her o’s and e’s properly. Possibly the girl had been left-handed – whatever she was, she was fluent enough in her middle years. Page after page of turquoise hieroglyphics challenged Mrs Jenkins’s failing sight. It seemed bizarre to Melanie that Brenda kept so fervently in touch with her mother, chronicling her Toronto life so thoroughly but being ignorant of the fact that her mother could now read only from the Large Print section of the local library. Perhaps it was just as well this was the case, otherwise Mrs Jenkins would be perusing the cheap-flights sections at the back of the Sunday papers and wondering why she was never invited to cross the Atlantic on an out-of-season special offer. Brenda’s letters were always crammed with news of recently acquired material goods – particularly hearty outdoor equipment which made Mel feel she was reading through the L. L. Bean catalogue. This time there was husband Hal’s new hunting rifle, a couple of Arctic-quality sleeping bags, the winter cover for the pool, son Barty’s drop-head car – second-hand, but with scarlet leather seats. How much could a few hundred dollars for her mother’s air fare hurt?
‘They’re so far away,’ Mrs Jenkins sighed now, gazing out of the window past Melanie as if Toronto might just come into view on a passing cloud. Melanie stopped reading and poured her aged neighbour another cup of tea. It was all she could do, really. Mrs Jenkins didn’t want to hear her making suggestions about visits, raising hopes and possibilities that just weren’t going to happen.
‘You must miss Brenda a lot,’ Mel said, cursing herself for the inadequate platitude.
‘Well yes I do, but you want them to get on in life,’ Mrs Jenkins said. ‘You don’t want to stand in their way.’
I would, Mel thought fiercely, I’d stand in Brenda’s bloody way with a return ticket and the grandchildren all lined up before it’s too late and they’re all rushing over here for the funeral. Depressed, she returned to the letter and continued, ‘“And the big news, I saved it for last! Hal’s got a business trip to Europe so I’m coming with him for a visit. School will be out by then so Barty and Lee-Ann will come too . . .” They’re coming over!’ Mel couldn’t keep her astonishment out of her voice. ‘They’re coming to see you!’
‘They’d better hurry up then, I’m eighty-one, you know.’
* * *
Max from Green Piece was not what anyone could call a speedy worker. On his initial inspection visit, he had been accompanied by a business partner who hadn’t appeared since, and Max seemed to have taken on all the work himself and occasionally went missing. Beyond Melanie’s back gate was a skip that was only very, very slowly being filled with the rejected contents of her flower beds. If he didn’t get a move on, the whole lot would have rotted down and be ready for digging back in as compost. Max had given her a quote for the entire job so he wasn’t, thank goodness, being paid by the hour, but she couldn’t help suspecting that he was spreading his services out, working on at least two other jobs at the same time – for clients who were clearly more important, or more profitable, than she was.
‘It’s always the same,’ Sarah told her over coffee at Costa’s in Richmond. ‘It’s what they do with lone women clients – plumbers always tell you they need a vital part and don’t come back for a fortnight, leaving you with a defunct boiler and a dripping tap. Remember Cherry’s kitchen?’
Melanie did. When Cherry was renovating her flat, post-inheritance, she’d existed for two months with a kitchen that was no more than a sink and a plank. Bare lethal wires poked from the walls and ceiling, the flooring was rough broken concrete and there was a lurking smell of drains. She had become a world-class expert on takeout pizzas: ‘I could go on Record Breakers, if it
was still going,’ she’d complained. ‘I could tell you what it was and where it came from and its fancy menu-name blindfold.’
‘She got quite plump at the time,’ Sarah reminisced, not without a note of sly pleasure.
‘Mmm,’ Mel agreed, giving her own left thigh a testing squeeze. It felt too soft. One week without the car meant no trips to the gym. She could have cycled, her conscience told her, or taken a bus (lined up at the bus stop with Ben and his schoolmates – would he speak to her if she did? Or just skulk and glower, praying fervently that she wouldn’t single him out?) But that would have taken half the morning, time when she could be writing . . . or having coffee with Sarah.
‘So you’re coming tomorrow night? To this reunion?’ Sarah reminded her.
‘Yeah, OK. What do we wear?’ Mel giggled ‘Old school hat? Do you remember those straw boaters? They made good frisbees.’
‘They did. I remember boys at the bus stop nicking them off our heads and whizzing them into the road under cars.’
‘And all the goody-goody girls kept theirs on with elastic under their chins.’
‘Do you think they’ll all be there? All the smug ones, the ones who never rolled their waistbands over so their skirts were up to their knickers?’
‘Sure to be. They’re just the sort who’d be bound to turn up. It’ll be a sea of Jaeger and Country Casuals and clever ways with scarves.’
Sarah downed the last of her coffee. ‘It’s really the old members of staff I want to see.’
