by Judy Astley
She glared at the bin bag which waited by the back door to be taken down to the dustbin. It bulged with obvious bottle shapes. A beer can had pierced a hole and poked out, pointing a broken ring pull at her.
‘Someone’ll cut themselves, taking that out,’ she said, indicating the sharp metal. ‘You could sever a vein.’
‘I know, I know.’ Melanie reached across and shoved the can further into the depths of the bag.
‘And nobody would know. You could be lying here all alone, bleeding to death. Now if you and Roger . . .’
Mel put her hands over her ears. Huge tears pushed their way out of her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. They felt as big as marbles. She was aware of them individually as they fell, and a weirdly disconnected part of her brain marvelled at how each one formed in her eyes, welled up to overflowing and gradually tipped itself out over the edge, like a reluctant but determined suicide going over a high balcony.
‘Gracious, Melanie, what on earth’s the matter? Was it something I said?’ Gwen sat down next to Mel and put her hand on hers, rather gingerly.
Melanie looked down at the skin on her mother’s hand. It was thin, dry, speckled. If you touched it, it would crackle. The folds and lines were rather beautiful, she thought in an odd, detached way, like a dried-out river valley pictured from space.
‘It’ll be hormones.’ Gwen nodded wisely at her. ‘You’re not getting any younger, are you?’
‘It’s not hormones. I’m fine,’ Mel protested.
‘It’s the time of year then,’ Gwen decreed, risking some gentle patting. ‘People on their own do feel it worst around Christmas.’
Melanie smiled at her mother. There was no point arguing this particular toss, Gwen would never believe her.
‘Mrs Jenkins has been burgled,’ she told her, as she reached across for kitchen towel to blow her nose on. Was it less than ten hours before that she’d used this paper roll to staunch Max’s blood? Where was he? He’d said he’d be back, that there were still things to finish, like wrapping fleece around the plants to protect them from frost. She really wished he was with her now, even if he was down at the far end of the garden doing something loud and messy involving cement and a hammer.
‘And whoever did it,’ she went on, ‘has hit her and knocked her out. She’s been taken to the hospital.’
‘Oh, so that’s why you’ve got her dog – I thought you’d taken up walking in the park. That poor woman, she’ll never feel safe in her own home again.’
Mel wiped the tears away. They seemed to have stopped as suddenly as they’d started, as if there’d been just that amount of spare salt water, no more.
‘Look, why don’t you come home with me?’ Gwen suggested at last. ‘Daddy would love to see you and we could have a nice fish pie for lunch. I’ve got one in the freezer. It only needs mike-ing.’ She looked at Melanie intently. ‘You know, you could come and stay properly if you like, back in your old room. It’s not as if . . . Well, till Rosa gets back from university. You don’t want to be on your own.’
Melanie got up and started clattering with the dishes in the sink, shoving them carelessly and fast into the dishwasher. She was touched by the invitation, but didn’t want her mother to see how very much she couldn’t bear the thought of returning to her childhood home, even for one night, to sleep as someone’s child again in her old bedroom. She also caught sight of her mother looking nervous, taking sharp glances at the freezer. Mel could almost read her mind, could sense her wondering whether having her daughter to stay would involve moving the frozen fish pies aside to make room for a bag of dead squirrels.
‘It’s a very kind thought,’ she said eventually. ‘But I’ve got to stay here and talk to Brenda – Mrs Jenkins’s daughter – tell her what’s happened. She’ll be back soon. It’ll be a shock for her but she’ll want to know the details from me, not from some police officer who doesn’t really know. And then there’s the dog, and the cat . . .’
Gwen stood up quickly and tucked her scarf round her neck. ‘All right, Mel, I expect that’s the best plan really, but remember, if you ever want . . .’
‘Thanks, Mum, I will. And I’ll let you know what happens with Mrs Jenkins.’
‘Oh yes, do, I like her. We had a very nice lunch together that day you went out. She might enjoy a visit at the hospital.’ The thought seemed to cheer Gwen quite considerably. Mel was glad – her mother was now distracted from her daughter’s stubborn solitariness and was mentally running through the choices: whether to take grapes or tangerines, The Lady or People’s Friend on her visit to the hospital.
‘And Melanie.’ Gwen, by the open front door, turned and spoke almost in a whisper to Mel, as if half the street was all ears. ‘Go and do something about yourself. Have a bath, wear something pretty, put some lipstick on. It makes all the difference.’
‘I will, Mum, I promise. Thanks.’
Brenda and Hal and their pair of teenagers squeezed their ample bodies out of the taxi and argued loudly on the pavement over who should carry which bags into the house. Lee-Ann’s mouth was turned down at the corners in a sulk that almost prompted Melanie to warn her that her face would stay like that if the wind changed. That was, it crossed her mind with renewed depression, exactly the kind of thing her mother had said to her when she was little. Gwen had never said it to Vanessa, not that she could recall, because Vanessa’s face had been permanently set in a smile. ‘Born to please, that one,’ her mother had said, ‘born to please.’ The phrase, almost sung, would be followed up with something along the lines of ‘Now why can’t you be more like that, Melanie?’
She hadn’t caught Vanessa, behind her back, putting her tongue out at Melanie, digging her nails into her leg, making her squeal as they sat beside each other at the table. Gwen hadn’t caught her with a pair of nail scissors, either, cutting small sly holes in Melanie’s dolls’ dresses, holes small enough to be missed on first looking, so that by the time Mel discovered them Vanessa would be nowhere near either dresses or scissors and suspicion would fall on Melanie herself.
‘You were just jealous of her,’ Roger had said when she’d described a classic example of sibling rivalry.
‘I probably was,’ Mel agreed. ‘The first child is an only child for a while. It’s hard to give up that complete attention you get. Especially when you’re only fifteen months old.’
When her time came to have children, Melanie had dreaded a repeat of her own childhood battles and been careful not to produce two of them too close together. The four-year gap had seemed ideal. But then Daniel hadn’t survived, and a lot of things were not ideal after that.
Melanie drove Brenda and Lee-Ann to the hospital. Hal offered to go too, but in a manner that suggested he would, if pushed, come up with a lot of excuses not to be there. Mel could read in his reluctant expression that, though he was eager not to cause pain, he knew for sure that hospital beds were female terrain, that he would be in the way there, that this was Brenda’s mother, not his, and that he had his own masculine way of being useful. ‘I’ll stay here, fix the door and put up a chain. Barty can walk the dog,’ he volunteered.
In the car, Brenda clutched a box of tissues and her daughter’s hand. ‘Hal hates hospitals,’ she said. ‘They make him feel queasy.’
‘I don’t think anyone’s that keen on them,’ Melanie reassured her.
‘I hate them too. Why’d I have to come?’ Lee-Ann whined.
‘She’ll wanna see you,’ Brenda said bluntly.
‘Won’t she wanna see Barty too?’
‘He can come tomorrow. Too many people might make her tired,’ Brenda told her, taking a shaky deep breath and becoming tearful. ‘If she’s still . . . still with us. Poor Mom! We should never have gone and left her.’
It wasn’t the moment, Mel thought as she pulled into the hospital car park, to point out that as they’d left her on her own for the last fifteen years or so, they could hardly have foreseen that another week would make such a difference. She remembe
red, as she went with them along the hospital’s corridor, the mental picture she’d had of Mrs Jenkins sipping coffee at a sunny table outside the Café de Flore. Would she really have liked Paris? Or would she have worried about the dog, worried that her arthritis would play up, hated the food, mistrusted the language?
‘She’s in here?’ Brenda stopped at the door of the long ward and looked at the double line of beds. She seemed to be horror-struck, gazing around as if she was taking in a scene from a years-old film. The hospital, although impressively rebuilt and ultra-modern at the front, kept a couple of Victorian wings with traditional long wards far away at the back. It was as if they were being kept specially, just till the present generation of old people died out, so that they wouldn’t be flummoxed by small mixed wards and high-tech surroundings. Ancient ladies in pastel dressing gowns shuffled around, some laboriously wheeling drips or catheter equipment alongside them. Visitors huddled beside beds administering home-cooked food, spooning it into pale, frail, paper-thin relatives. There was a sad smell of mild decay, of leaked urine overlaid with the aroma of recent lunch.
‘Why doesn’t she have her own room?’ Lee-Ann asked, bewildered by the antiquated scene.
Melanie smiled. In contrast to Lee-Ann, she found the place reassuring. She would have to explain to the girl that sharing a huge, old-fashioned, shabby ward with twenty-three strangers meant that you were probably going to be all right. In this country the occupation of a precious single room on the National Health Service tended to mean only one thing: it was the ante-room to death.
It was a bit late in the day for serious Christmas shopping by the time Melanie went off to meet Cherry. Twilight was already starting to gather as she emerged from the tube at Knightsbridge. She wouldn’t get much of it done, but it didn’t matter – it was just important somehow to launch herself into central London’s careless, brightly lit bustle and join in the annual crazed buying fest. Having spent so long protesting to all and sundry that she relished being on her own, she could hardly wait to lose herself in a crowd and chat with a good friend.
Cherry was waiting outside the Sloane Street entrance to Harvey Nichols. The new radiance that had lit her face the night before, when she’d told Mel and Sarah about Helena, was still there. Even her chestnut hair seemed to shine more richly. Something new in her had been brought to life. It was about time, Melanie thought; Cherry had kept her personal capacity for love locked up and dormant for far too many years. Somehow it didn’t surprise her that Cherry had fallen for a woman. After Nathan, she’d seeded and cultivated a distrust of male-female relationships that was rooted so deep it would take another lifetime to shift it.
‘So, how’s your poor neighbour? Any news since this morning?’ Cherry asked, as they made their way into the cosmetics department. The counters were at least six deep in eager purchasers. Had this been such a good idea, Melanie wondered, feeling the beginnings of claustrophobia, wouldn’t it have been more sensible to buy everything she needed over the Internet?
‘She’s confused, sore and wanting to go home,’ Mel yelled to Cherry, over the battle between a woman demanding a Susheimo foundation in Dizzy Peach and an assistant assuring her there was no such shade.
‘Will she be allowed to go home?’ Cherry shouted back, as she ran her finger over an eye-shadow tester. It was a deep pinky-gold, Mel noticed: things had changed for Cherry – usually she never veered from a safe smoky grey.
‘I don’t know, to be honest. She’s turned into one of those parcel people, you know, when the “system” takes over and she has to be assessed? Brenda won’t be around to take care of her for more than a few more days, though I think she’s trying to change their flight so she can help sort things out. You hear about old ladies walled up in hospital wards for weeks and weeks, waiting to be placed somewhere by the powers that be. I hope she comes back home.’
Mel would miss the old lady a lot if she didn’t, it occurred to her. Mrs Jenkins had been around all the time she and Roger had lived in that house, all through Rosa’s growing up, through the loss of Daniel. She’d babysat, cat-sat, kept an eye on the house when they’d been away for holidays. She had long been Southernbrook Road’s senior resident. If she went, someone else would move up to that position – probably Gerald from the other side of Mel. It was depressing, somehow, to think that in her turn she too could be the lone Elder Inhabitant. Panicking at the idea, she told herself, as she tried out a deep purple lipstick on the back of her hand, that she could move on and away, but then remembered all the lovely new garden. How would she face Max and tell him she was off to start again, casual and heedless, say in a riverside flat with only a titchy plantless balcony? Perhaps he wouldn’t care, she thought, as she trailed after Cherry to the outside door. After all, she was only a client, nothing special.
‘What are you going to tell your folks?’ Rota-Girl Kate was sitting on Rosa’s floor. Rosa was stretched out on the bed, stroking her expanded stomach with great fondness. She knew that from where Kate sat the bump would look exaggerated, like when you were lying on the grass at the bottom of a hill and the land seemed to be rising above you forever.
‘And why haven’t you told them yet?’ Kate went on. ‘Why are you having it? Don’t you believe in abortion?’
‘Leave off her, Kate. What kind of a question is that?’ Desi snapped at her.
‘No, it’s OK, Desi, they’re all fair questions.’ Rosa thought for a moment. ‘I think I want to have this baby more than I want to do anything else right now,’ she said, stretching her arms above her head and yawning.
‘You mean you’re having it because you can’t be arsed not to?’ Kate’s face was screwed up with overdone incomprehension.
‘That’s not what I said,’ Rosa told her. ‘I’ll be good at this. I can do it. Mum will be cool about it.’ She hesitated a few seconds, then added, ‘I think.’
‘And what about your dad?’ Kate persisted. ‘Will he go spare?’
Rosa laughed softly. ‘Dad? I don’t think he’s got any grounds for complaint, somehow, not with his track record.’ She laughed again. ‘In the space of just a few weeks he’ll become a father and then a grandfather. I wonder what his little-girl wife will make of that.’
Tina Keen was all finished with her case. She wound up the paperwork in the office and Melanie, back at her keyboard that evening, allowed her to go out for a celebratory dinner with the chief constable. He was married, of course – Tina’s men usually were – it was how it was for women past thirty. In his honour Tina was wearing the kind of underwear Sarah would heartily approve of – solving a case was a massively sexy achievement. Mel had often thought she should look things of this sort up on the Internet or in the library, find out for sure if there was some hormonal trigger associated with success at work that applied to women in the same way that it did, with a testosterone rush, for men. Whichever way it was, for the purposes of the book’s ending, Tina was feeling warm and powerful, accommodating and seductive.
Over the sliced duck and sticky mango sauce the chief constable told Tina that he and his wife had ‘different interests’. He ran his hand up Tina’s silky leg and encountered suspenders, a proper lacy stocking-top and that soft warm strip of exposed flesh at the top of her thigh. She continued to eat her duck steadily while the chief constable kneaded his stubby nicotine-stained fingers into her leg. She really should, she thought as he prodded deep into her flesh, go on a diet.
Melanie stopped typing and looked down into the garden. She’d left plenty of lights on downstairs this time, even though she wasn’t writing anything that would make her jumpy. She would talk to Max about getting lights fixed up outside, artily placed ones so that the shapes of the plants would show up like ghostly statues.
Concentrating on Tina once more, Mel let her finish the duck and help herself to extra potatoes – creamy dauphinois ones, for if Tina was to sign up with Shape Sorters she should be allowed a last generous binge. Then she let her take a long, cool look at the
chief constable, weigh up the why and why not of the situation. He was sweating visibly now as his hand stroked and rubbed. If Tina knew Perfect Patty’s husband Dave, she would be strongly reminded of him.
‘Excuse me, just for a moment,’ Tina murmured to the chief constable. Ever polite to ladies, he half-stood, clutching his napkin to the giveaway bulge in his trousers as she took herself and her handbag to the loo. She looked at herself in the mirror. Too much make-up, too accommodating, too generous in the choice of underwear, too little discernment in her choice of date. Tina’s reflection reminded her of the murder victims she’d just had to deal with. She was now about to have sex with a man she didn’t much fancy, just as they all had – the difference being that she wasn’t going to get paid. Or murdered. She’d be better off on her own, she thought, as she retouched her lipstick. Melanie provided her with a handy fire exit and allowed her out of the restaurant by a side door. A black cab was conveniently passing the end of the road. It stopped for Tina as she raised her hand, and Melanie sent her home to her flat, by herself.
Melanie raided the fridge and found some bacon, eggs and cold roast potatoes. There was also a bottle of cheap fizz that was perfectly chilled and would do well enough for now to celebrate the completion of Dying For It. The real celebration would come later, when her agent Dennis had read it and raved about it and the publishers gave it the thumbs up. She fried up the bacon and potatoes together till both were too crisp for most civilized people’s tastes, and then cracked an egg over the top. Just because Tina Keen was about to start a diet, that didn’t mean that her creator had to join in as well. The feast was piled onto a plate and Melanie took it through to the sitting room, along with the bottle and a glass. She settled herself comfortably on the sofa, shoved aside newspapers and magazines from the low table in front of her and put the bottle there at the ready. She dug the TV’s remote control from behind a cushion and flipped through the channels. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was just about to finish. Melanie turned up the volume and then sat with the remote control still in her outstretched hand and watched in amazement as, without needing her after all, without her being his Friend to Phone, Max shook hands with Chris Tarrant and left the programme’s studio with a cheque for £64,000.
