by Lynn Watson
The white blossom was gone now and the trees lining the wide street wore the deep green leaves of summer. The thick foliage still ensured that no one could see in and they weren’t in a hurry to move away from the window and onto the sofa, engrossed as they were in their conversation.
She had put two pairs of Junoco truffles on the table and instructed Ned not to touch them. He peered closely at them.
‘So, what’s so special? Where do they come from? When can I try one?’
‘Hold on, not yet. There’s a lot I don’t know myself, but I’ll give you some of the background and then you can decide if you want a taste.’
Ned laughed and marched his fingers towards the nearest chocolate, as if making to snatch it away. ‘Yes, I do want a taste, most definitely – but go on, tell me.’
Fran explained how she had met Daniela and Vicky and been invited to join them in the new business. As she had anticipated, he was intrigued from the beginning and didn’t need much information, beyond the fact that there was a secret ingredient and the combined effect of that and the ultra-dark chocolate was to make you more curious and imaginative. He was a natural risk-taker; that much was obvious. It probably explained how he had achieved such success in life.
‘It sounds thoroughly shady already, nicely dubious! Carry on, I’m enjoying this but I want my truffles soon, please.’
She refilled their wine glasses and helped herself to a satsuma from the fruit bowl. Shady and dubious – the term ‘pillow talk’ came to mind and she imagined him in his long trench coat with its upturned collar and the fedora at a rakish angle. It was a shame that their arrangement didn’t involve going back to bed after dinner. He was leaning forward and gazing pleadingly at her across the table.
‘Can I open a chocolate now, please? I’m beginning to feel like a little kid with a surprise birthday present.’
‘Okay, okay, very soon. It’s 10.30, so we can have the first one now and the second one in an hour’s time. I know it’s extending our usual evening but I guess that’s okay, for a special occasion. It’s good to sleep afterwards, so the timing is just right. I’ll take a cab home tonight and tomorrow we can send each other messages on how it’s going. I’d like you to take notes, if you will – key points about how it feels.’
‘What – homework to spoil the fun?’
She had considered asking if she could stay the night with him, but it wasn’t what she wanted and it would upset their rhythm. The thought of having her first experience with Junoco at least partly in solitude was also appealing.
His fingers were now hovering above the truffles.
‘Okay, are you ready?’
‘Here we come, ready or not!’
They both picked up and opened the blue-wrapped chocolates. They were spherical with a wavy surface and very dark; the darkest chocolates she had seen in her life. She popped the whole truffle into her mouth, while Ned bit his in half. As she sucked on the chocolate and tried to speak at the same time, her voice was muffled by the melting lump.
‘Ooh, that’s super strong and bitter, more so than I imagined. I’ll have to get used to it. It won’t take effect straight away, remember. And there’s a second one.’
They finished eating the first chocolates, pulled frightened faces at each other and laughed nervously. Fran moved her tongue around her lips, making sure she had consumed all of it and relishing the aftertaste.
‘Wow, I can see what they mean by intense. Nobody’s going to want to scoff too many of these at once. The advice is for only one pair of truffles a week.’
‘One pair a week? Sounds like socks!’ He suddenly raised his right hand and pointed his forefinger to the ceiling in a mock gesture of exclamation. ‘I’ve had my first brilliant thought! Your magic dust might be working already. Let’s try out some new ideas, just for practice.’
He leant back, tipping his chair and lifting both hands triumphantly. ‘Okay then, here goes. We could set up a new type of male escort agency, with me as the number-one hunk and a few other sexy guys. We’d be co-directors – you’d wear big, black-rimmed specs and all the clients would adore you. That’s the brilliance of it: its appeal to women that are tempted to get involved but wouldn’t use a purely online escort service, most of which don’t actually exist anyway. The fraudsters see it as the perfect opportunity to fleece naive guys for upfront fees and then run off with the dosh. We’d pride ourselves on managing it properly.’
Fran was almost sure he was teasing her, although he seemed to know a fair bit about the world he was describing. She adopted a stern expression and pretended to take off her black-rimmed specs.
‘Be careful what you wish for, boy. It sounds beguiling to me. We’d need to be picky about recruitment; the guys naturally, but also the female clients – definitely high-end, that’s where the market is at the moment, I imagine. Let’s see – American businesswomen in town for a few days, lawyers and so on, people who are expected to attend formal social events, the odd hen party perhaps, and women who want a luxury break with extras, as it were.’
‘Yes, exactly – we’re on the same page. Let’s hold that one there, fantastic idea. What about you? Have you got one?’
She frowned and put her fist under her chin in the classic ‘thinker’ pose. ‘Well, okay. One off the top of my head is to set up distraction robberies. Say we go into a café separately, a crowded place, lots happening. You order cooked breakfast, and when it arrives you pick up the bottle of ketchup, take the lid off and shake it wildly from side to side, so a stream of ketchup erupts in blobs and goes all over the customers sitting at the nearby tables and across their books, laptops or coffee cups. In the ensuing chaos, with staff and customers preoccupied or going over to help, I do a flash sweep of tables as I leave the café and we split the booty.’
It was his turn to laugh. ‘It sounds so precise. Come on, have you actually done this?’
‘No, but I’ve seen the ketchup episode and thought afterwards that was what I should have done, instead of giggling helplessly into my mug of tea.’
‘Well, what do you think, Fran? Has the chocolate had any effect yet?’
‘I’m not sure. It’s too soon. Are we being imaginative or just plain silly?’
They continued in this vein until it was time to sample the second, gold-wrapped chocolate. This was also round and dark, but with a smooth surface. The taste was similar to the blue, but with the hint of a flavour that neither of them could name. Once it had fully melted in her mouth, Fran suddenly felt ready to leave and they agreed they would get some sleep and report back the next day. She called a cab and they had a lingering goodnight kiss, in breach of normal protocol.
***
The house was in semi-darkness when she got back, the street light lending a low white glow to the front room. She lit two long candles and sat on the sofa to check for any early effects, mentally noting that she needed to get a diary organised. A paper notepad would be easiest for getting the initial notes down and then she would write a weekly report on her computer. The candlelight was playing on the wall of the chimney breast and she began to recognise geometric shapes, in outline at first but growing brighter and more colourful as she watched; a red circle, a yellow triangle, squares, cubes and pyramids.
She looked around the room and back to the hearth, where Guacamole sat on an animal-skin drum that her uncle in Africa had sent to her as a child. Guacamole was a soft toy about ten inches high, a furry mole dressed in a white cable-knit jumper and peering over a pair of round, gold-rimmed spectacles, which perched lopsidedly halfway down his nose. She had bought him on impulse at a country Christmas market because he looked like her dad, and she called him Guacamole because it was suitably pretentious for a mole of his type and demeanour and Dad would have found it amusing.
Guacamole returned her gaze, his expression no longer static but apparently full of emotion – what was it – sad, affectionate? She held his stare for a short while and started to feel spooked, so reached to s
witch on the table lamp. In the brighter electric light, he still looked different but had regained his fixed expression, which she now interpreted as one of gentle amusement. It was her father’s habitual expression, she realised now. It wasn’t only the trademark jumper and the gold-rimmed specs that made them alike. She walked over to Guacamole, picked him up and kissed him on the top of his soft head.
‘Goodnight, Guacamole. Sweet dreams. See you in the morning.’
It was late by this time and she lay in bed, letting her mind wander, turning on the radio to catch the last haunting notes of Sailing By and the late shipping forecast while she continued to monitor her mood and physical state – relaxed and calm, toes and fingers tingling, blinking at the passing colours and shapes, pentagons and hexagons, floating…
She woke soon after dawn in a dreamlike state. In front of her was a vast lake and she was sitting on a rock looking over a beach of coloured pebbles, which ranged from deep brown through red to orange and sandy yellow. A flotilla of small craft, boats and rafts, was coming towards her and as they got near to the beach, she stretched out her legs and gave them a gentle push with her bare feet to send them back into the water. She wasn’t frightened and treated it as a game, seeing how many she could keep at bay as the numbers increased and they kept bobbing back towards her.
There were people on all the boats but the only ones she recognised were her father, Lawrence, and her little sister, Marina. Dad stood beside the tiller to steer them in, while Marina, who was about two years old, waved at Fran over the side of the boat as they approached. She allowed them to land and then they were standing in a line at the edge of the water, throwing or skimming pebbles into the now-deserted lake. Marina had light blue eyes, elfin features and a mass of curls. Lawrence was wearing a navy cable-knit jumper and sunglasses instead of his gold-rimmed specs, but the gentle amusement was there, as well as his evident joy in playing with his two children.
The scene faded away. What type of dream was it, how different, how to describe it? Firstly, Fran felt certain she had been awake throughout. It was like a lucid dream turned inside out – as if she were bodily awake and experiencing a daydream, yet with the bizarre happenings and accepted irrationality of a full-on sleep dream. It was time to begin her Junoco diary.
At the kitchen table, she focused first on recalling the sequence of events in the dream and the magical setting by the lake. She went to the oak chest to find her notebook and lying beside the notebook was a big sketch pad, which she had left untouched for years, and a tin full of old pencils and crayons. She sharpened three pencils, thick, medium and fine, and spent the next hour drawing a picture of Marina, with her blue eyes and untidy mop of curls. When she had finished, she wrote in the bottom left-hand corner of the page: Marina with Francesca and Dad by the lake.
Her father was more difficult to draw, because she was trying to achieve a likeness to the person she had known and loved for so long and who filled her memories down the years. She started on the sketch several times, tearing out each page after a few minutes and crumpling it into a ball before shooting it at the wastepaper basket. She put it aside temporarily and went back to Marina, conjuring up an image of how she would have looked at twenty-one and drawing her easily and confidently. The fair curls were still there, but longer now, more wavy, and her face was open and reassuring, just as Fran’s was always said to be.
Looking up at the kitchen clock, she saw it was only just after seven. She wasn’t due at the shop until the afternoon, so she could keep going on this for a while longer. She was immersed, finding the flow of her sketching for the first time in years and believing, with her depictions of Marina, that she was producing a near-perfect likeness to her sister, although there was no photo or actual memory to go on.
Her phone vibrated beside her and she turned towards it, not wanting to break her concentration but attuned, like everyone now was, to respond to its demand for attention. It was Judi calling, too early in the day but probably just to confirm that Fran was still going to visit them on Saturday.
‘Frankie, is that you?’
It was Andy’s voice, distinctly shaky. This was it. Her stomach contracted.
‘Hi, Andy – what’s happened?’
‘She’s gone, an hour ago. The nurse was here. We’ve lost her.’
Fran shifted the phone to her left ear, automatically picked up her pencil and continued with her drawing of Marina through their short conversation and long silences, her eyes pricking and her right hand shaking as she added shading and tried to get the nose and chin exactly right.
She carried on sketching through the morning, having set herself a project to draw Marina at different ages. She didn’t want to think about Judi, losing her. To gain inspiration, she put Marina in some of her strongest memories, reimagining her as an indulged little sister making dens in the hay bales, a favourite auntie playing with Fran’s children in the garden and an attentive grown-up daughter standing beside her at Dad’s funeral.
She could have persevered with this all day, but forced herself to stop in good time to get dressed and ready for work. On the short journey there, she noticed that everything was brighter and she was picking out details that she hadn’t seen before: the black centres and deep orange of the tall poppies that had sprung up in her front garden, the shape and fall of the rosemary sprigs, and the unusual markings on the tortoiseshell cat that appeared from nowhere and followed her a short distance but never beyond the corner.
Luckily, it was school holidays and they had a young girl, Amy, working in the shop, so Fran was able to stay in the background more than usual as customers came and went. She could hear that Vicky was upstairs in the office with Daniela and she wasn’t surprised when they asked her to join them.
She described her lakeside dream scene and her conviction that she was awake and letting her imagination flow, rather than asleep and having an ordinary dream.
‘I was aware of being in both places. I was lying in bed and at the same time I was beside the lake. When it faded out, I felt compelled to go downstairs and draw sketches of my little sister and my dad. I became immersed in it right up until… I was immersed in it for hours, which was odd and must have been down to Junoco as I haven’t done any sketching for years; hardly at all since I left art school when I was twenty.’
Vicky was taking notes and she looked up sharply at this point, while Daniela clapped her hands in triumph.
‘This is exactly what we want! All the signs are that we’ve got the mix right, just enough of an effect and so far the reports are almost all enjoyable and positive. Well done, Fran, an excellent report.’
‘I’m not saying the sketches are any good, mind you, but I was moved to pick up the sketch pad and pencil, which was extraordinary. Oh, and I forgot to say that the evening before, about an hour after having the chocolates, I started seeing radiantly coloured shapes, triangles and hexagons and so on, tumbling through space.’
She also mentioned that she had shared the Junoco truffles with a friend and would feed back on his experience. The one piece of information she withheld was the Guacamole moment, her feeling of emotional connection with him. It was too surreal, too personal and difficult to talk about.
She returned to the shop and was happy to be distracted by Alex, the friendly cross-dressing customer, who was looking for something special to wear at her god-daughter’s christening; something gorgeous but ‘not so gorgeous that it upstages the baby’. They had just decided on the dress when Vicky came downstairs. She waited until both Alex and Amy had left.
‘Are you okay, Fran? You looked tired earlier and sounded a bit flat, even though what you told us was so exciting. Is there anything else to say about the chocolates? Did they make you feel down, change your mood at all? We’re trying to assess all the evidence as best we can, so we can report back to the scientists in South America and ensure the optimal beneficial effect.’
Fran felt herself finally giving way and her tears erupted in a
flood, sudden and unstoppable. Vicky clasped her forearm, tightening and then loosening her grip rhythmically as if to instil courage. Without asking any questions, she suggested they went for a drink at the Green Duck pub by the pond when the shop closed. Fran just nodded, relieved that she didn’t have to offer an apology or immediate explanation.
***
They found a quiet table beside a tree in the far corner of the pub garden. The landlord welcomed them as he prepared the oven and spit for the Friday night summer hog roast. It was hard to say that Judi had died, passed away; to speak it out loud and confirm the stark reality. She told Vicky about their long history and her friend’s illness, the remissions and relapses, the way Judi was dismissive of pain and full of plans for the future when offered any vestige of hope by the medical teams or the many alternative practitioners she came to believe in. She had searched online and bought heaps of potions and pills from India, Cambodia, China and other countries, saying she had nothing to lose but often feeling too ill to try them if and when they arrived.
‘And Vicky, she had such a wild streak, she always did. I loved her for it at ten years old and I still love her for it now; a crazy girl from beginning to end, beautiful, rebellious and always a bit over the edge. One time, we had taken the pony and trap – she lived on the most incredible farm, and we took the trap, it was painted yellow – and we went off on our own for a picnic and a swim in the river, and while we were swimming, the pony, Jambo, he…’
By mid-evening, the oven was spitting its final embers and the two women were swapping stories about their love lives. Vicky was single too, having broken off a fraught relationship with her long-term partner some two years earlier. She had one son, who was eighteen and living with his dad in Manchester while doing an apprenticeship.
As they stood up and walked towards the pub’s garden gate to exit onto the side path, Vicky returned to the topic of Judi.
‘Can I suggest something, Fran? You don’t have to say yes, but I mean it. Shall I come with you to the funeral, as you said you’d be going on your own? Only to support you and be there and I wouldn’t have to come to the actual service, unless you wanted me to. It’s a beautiful part of the coast and we could find a B&B and stay over the night before, or after, whatever. I can sort out looking after the shop and Daniela can always contact me if there’s a problem.’
