The Society Game

by H. Lanfermeijer

  THE SOCIETY

  GAME

  Olivia Hopkins,

  The Unreliable Witness

  H. Lanfermeijer

  Copyright © 2018 H. Lanfermeijer

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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  ISBN 9781789012781

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  To my family, you are all I need to love life.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jason

  Eight months ago

  ‘The devil walks amongst us. You can’t see, hear or smell him but you can sense his presence and when you do, run.’

  Aunt Olive said this to me twenty years ago when I was fifteen. At the time I just thought she was nuts so I replied with a nod and continued with X-box.

  I hadn’t thought about what she’d said until the day I heard my uncle’s name on the ten o’clock news.

  I can’t say I knew my aunt particularly well; she was the skinny, manicured, up-tight relative who once declared to Mum that she would never have married Dad.

  ‘I wouldn’t even look at a man without a six-figure salary let alone one who thinks battered trainers with stone-washed jeans is suitable attire to be seen in public. Honestly, Janet, he shops in C&A and drinks bottled lager.’

  ‘Pretentious cow,’ Mum used to mutter under her breath.

  My aunt came back into my life on a wet Tuesday some months back when a letter from her arrived on my doorstep. I say letter, it was more of a manuscript for an epic film. It lay there, slightly damp from the rain, waiting for my return from work. The manila envelope was ragged at the edges and straining against the imprint of the brick of paper that was secured within it. I wanted to breathe in its contents instead of forfeiting my short evening to reading it, so I dodged my aunt until I crawled into my bed at ten after a supermarket meal for one, washed down with a pint.

  Normally my enthusiasm to read in bed is demonstrated by a pile of intellectual statement books on my night stand. They lie on top of one another, often added to and occasionally dusted but never opened. But I’d known this letter was coming to me and I couldn’t find a suitable excuse to ignore it any longer other than exhaustion.

  Mum and I think one other person received a similar letter. I didn’t want to be one of the ‘chosen’; I wanted to bin it and not return to the crap my aunt brought on my family.

  Mum received hers a month before mine. I understand why Mum refused to speak to me about its contents; it was too painful. I did try many times, as I wanted to support her, but she just changed the subject to trivial rubbish about her arguments with the gas board or asked about my day at work even though it’s a job I hate and a career that has stagnated for years. Diversions and frustrations; however, here it is, my Aunt Olive’s letter.

  Olive

  ‘Dear Jason, my dearest Jason,

  I’ll assume, as you read ‘my dearest’, you’re uncomfortable at my affection for you? Maybe you’re sceptical and wary that I’ve written? We haven’t properly seen or spoken to one another in so very long. But I beg you to believe me that whenever we met I was thrilled and that excitement never waned over the years.

  Your mother once idly commented, ‘Jason has the same outlook on life as you – you are both dreamers, more interested in fiction than life.’ From those few words, I felt ownership: my boy, my fellow dreamer.

  Our meetings became sparse as you grew and I blamed your mother for that. However, if I’d known how my angry words served no other purpose other than to increase the time between your visits, I would have savoured the few I had and humbly begged your mother kindly, sweetly, for just a little more access. Sadly, like so many of us, I was born with the sin of pride and I protested with apathy.

  Now I suspect it didn’t bother her that I appeared not to care that she was never available to see me, and I know it couldn’t have affected you that I was rarely around. I’m certain my absence steadily chased away my claim of family attachment and I assume I morphed from Aunt to acquaintance. The only person who was hurt was me.

  Today I savour the memories I have: from the tiny baby, compact and asleep in your babygrow, then the explorative toddler shuffling around my feet, to the excitable and giggling young boy pulling on my hand to play just one more game of football, then the teenager who boasted of his achievements in hockey. Now you are the handsome working gentleman travelling to the City of London to carve your name in the financial markets.

  I revisit these memories and occasionally I can feel the joy your being in this world gives me. They are my movies, which I can rewind and play whenever I wish and I thank you for playing in them. So, to me Jason, you are my dearest Jason.

  And for that I need to tell you why I’ve arrived where I am today; to let you know there are always choices in life and maybe my choices can influence yours.

  So where to begin my tale? Perhaps with my typical day from not too long ago.

  That day comprised of waking at whatever time my body chose. There were no rude interruptions from bells, no strict timetable to follow and no boss to dictate my hours.

  Nevertheless, I still had a collection of decisions to make from the moment I woke.

  The first was what exercise to start the morning? Either I had a personal trainer who came to the house gym or I traipsed down our garden, beyond the willow trees, past the summer house to our heated outdoor pool.

  Then what to wear? Which designer? Where was the venue? But by around one thirty I would be ready to leave for my lunch date with the girls (or shopping, as obviously I was not tied to only one event).

  An easy life perhaps?

  My dear Jason, to those who did not know me, the people who took a second look, the strangers who stared at me in the street, I was a beautiful, wealthy woman who encapsulated all that glamorous society should be. I was the lady in the best magazines who photographers tried to mimic with a prepubescent child model and the latest designer w
ear.

  But, justice isn’t made from one still, it’s made from twelve people listening to two barristers, interpreting that picture of a perfect woman in a perfect life. A quick glance at the image then the first interpretation may be of greed, unfair luck bejewelled on one person laughing at the common woman who couldn’t afford the shoes she walked in. But stare a little longer and the other, secret, silent interpretation is a desperately sad woman controlled and broken by the life that she had prostituted herself for.

  So, my darling Jason, justice is the lawyer who can shout the loudest about one picture in a biased society.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Olive

  Many, many years ago

  My first memories were of indulgent cuddles from my mum and dad amidst the sullen tantrums of my older sister, your mother, Janet.

  I have a photograph from when I was about three years old. I have red hair with large curls wrapped around my chubby, happy face. My blue eyes are framed by long eyelashes, my cheeks reddened from playing and my pink lips stretched by laughter. If you wish to take a look, I know Janet has a copy of the photograph I’m holding. It shows her cuddling me with a bored expression on her face, and she is being cuddled by Mum and Mum is being cuddled by Dad. As I recall, your mother’s copy is framed and hanging in her stairway, next to the oval mirror. I’d like to think it’s still there but I understand if it’s been discarded.

  By the time she was fifteen and I was eight, your mother created a thunderous atmosphere, oppressive and heavy. Eventually, Janet abdicated from the family. She left with your father to a flat near Woking.

  In the years that followed, I saw little of her. Instead I watched the decline in my parents’ health and it was me, as a naïve scared child, who had to watch them age. In the case of your grandad, I witnessed him shrivel up and wither away. I could no longer seek sanctuary in the safety of his lap. Instead, I stood frightened as Dad was slowly tortured to an early grave by pancreatic cancer. His last days and my last memories of him, when I was barely thirteen, were as a skeletal man forcing a smile for his daughters.

  You never knew your grandad and he never knew you, but if you had, then your life would be richer for it.

  I didn’t hear my Mum cry on the day he died, I didn’t hear her cry during the funeral and I don’t think she heard me cry. Instead, I would listen to her muffled sobbing at night after she had gone to bed, lying alone in the spot Dad used to be in. But still Janet rarely visited and the house remained quiet throughout the remainder of my teens with me going to school, Mum off to work, and us returning for dinner before East-Enders then bed. Gradually the sobbing stopped and an outwardly benign life continued.

  I confess I daydreamed of my future throughout my school life: I dreamt of a wardrobe full of gowns for all the evening functions I would attend and stunning suits to wear to the office for my dazzling career where I would meet my wealthy, handsome and successful husband.

  I wouldn’t be like the girls in class (as fate predicted), trudging through scripted pre-lived lines whereby they met some bloke from school or some club in town. Married by twenty-three, pregnant by twenty-five, in a two-bed semi and divorced by thirty-five with three kids. My parallel life would eclipse anyone I knew, as payment for how their lives had eclipsed mine at school.

  Thirty-six years ago

  It was then that you were born, just after my A’ level results. Your father was an adolescent crush who refused to go away. He was from Janet’s school and worked as an apprentice plumber until he was sacked for consistently choosing his bed over working. I know you don’t see your father these days but may I reassure you that you are not missing anything; I merely pity the gullible women who took him in during and, subsequently, after Janet.

  I still smile recalling the day I met you, two days into your life. You were wrapped tightly in a white swaddling blanket within a perspex hospital cot. I had an overwhelming urge to free you from those confines, but instead I mimicked your grandma in my hyperbolic: ‘Ahh, he’s gorgeous, beautiful. Well done!’

  From that day, I rewrote my script to include ultimately finding the perfect man and having a child as precious as you. Though, in my film, I would have my child in a private hospital in London or maybe New York, not Woking General NHS hospital. And I would be dressed in a midnight-blue, silk nightie whilst smiling serenely to my guests – not sobbing discreetly to any visitor, dressed in a blood-stained flannel gown given to me one Christmas ten years earlier.

  Your mother was overjoyed to have you but naturally frightened to be a new mum with no income and a man who was there in spirit but absent in support of any kind.

  Everyone around her pandered to her demands; your grandma, at that moment, was no exception and for the first two months she went to help every day in whatever way she could, right up to the day another argument erupted over some trivial matter (I think about number of feeding times), and the visits fizzled away.

  Mum was distraught. ‘I didn’t bring my children up to squander their education by scrounging from the state,’ she said over breakfast one morning. ‘Neither parent works or contributes anything to society. They merely expect and accept all their living needs from the taxpayer. Janet lives in a far better flat than most hard-working parents can afford!’

  ‘And what of the father?’ she lamented whilst scrubbing the kitchen floor one afternoon. ‘He lounges around his free accommodation watching Sky television or the like. The last time I was allowed to enter their ‘free abode’, he could muster only a nod of acknowledgement to me.’

  ‘He’s not at all ashamed or embarrassed that he does less than a parasite without a host’, she spat one evening during a re-run of Antiques Roadshow. ‘Instead, he just grunts to those who have worked all their lives to support their family and sleeps on a settee I paid for!’

  She hadn’t paid for it as it was a wedding gift to my parents over thirty years prior and it was either going to charity or to Janet, but I understood the point she made.

  Thankfully, it wasn’t long before your father disappeared. You were less than one year old. I was not surprised; he was merely following what was laid out in his personal script, written before he was born. This particular scene was entitled, ‘the typical, lazy, out-of-work man runs from responsibility to allow others to take care of his past failings’. It’s an example of the ‘responsibility scale’: if we were all to be placed in a virtual line from most caring and understanding all the way down to useless bum, your father started two thirds of the way down with aspirations to fall lower in the scale. I am aware of my lack of sensitive diplomacy surrounding your father but I’m reflecting many years of dinner-table discussions, of which you were a part. I also know that you may have inherited his nose and auburn hair, but the lazy gene bypassed you in favour of the more dominant accomplishment gene. Your father, in contrast, has achieved the bum scale.

  During this time the equilibrium of Mum’s body altered subtly. She was permanently tired and had severe shortness of breath. I regret merely listening to her diagnosis of acid reflux because one Tuesday, in the summer of your second year, I came home to an ambulance and Jean, from across the road, tugging at Mum’s lifeless arm. She was rushed to hospital and diagnosed with heart disease. She was fifty-four. Although she survived, her life was stripped to a wheelchair, with easy access railings everywhere.

  I was now twenty years old. I didn’t go out; I didn’t even try, I just melted into the walls of our house and waited on Mum who was slowly shrinking away into her wheelchair.

  Jason, I’ve relived my life and wondered where it was that led me to today? Which bank did I jump from to slide down the stream that brought me here? Maybe it was the loss of my father, maybe losing my sister to your father or maybe it was the 11th of April of my twenty-first year.

  That spring day my mum was shipped off to hospital where I took up vigil; and May 8th she died. And I was alone except
for Janet and blessed you.

  A few days after saying goodbye to Mum, I was summoned with my sister, to a solicitor’s office to discuss Mum’s will.

  In Woking, opposite a sixties’ bland concrete fountain, was Thomas & Lewis. The office was on the third floor of the last remaining Elizabethan building in the town. Its façade stuck out like a groomed lady in a brothel surrounded, as it was, by faded, exhausted, breathless buildings.

  I was five minutes early for my appointment in the office on the third floor so I sat down in the waiting area. I looked at the pimpled plain receptionist opposite me and I smirked that even in my grief I had bothered to wear make-up.

  Janet arrived less than five minutes after me.

  ‘I thought I was going to be late. The babysitter didn’t turn up on time then I missed my bus and to cap it all I went to the wrong end of town as the bus driver swore Raynor building was that end.’ Janet humphed as she slumped into the chair beside me.

  ‘And hello to you too Janet! I’ve been here ages, absolutely ages. And don’t worry, I’ve signed us both in. I would have appreciated a phone call, something to let me know where to meet – I just had to assume it was here. And should you be interested, I had difficulty getting here too – the taxi driver had no idea where this was either but I managed to get here on time.’

  Janet’s slim face rolled my way.

  ‘Don’t start Olive. I’m still early and just because you’re earlier than me just means you’re wasting more time than me. Plus, I have a few more things to worry about than how my hair is to be worn today.’

  Her face rolled back so I could get a glimpse of her dark hair shoved into a misshapen ponytail.

  ‘You’re not even wearing tights, Janet.’

  ‘Seriously, shut up!’ Janet lurched her face towards mine, forcing my neck back against the metal bar of the chair. ‘And with what money do I buy tights? Nappies and little things called food use up all my money. You, on the other hand, don’t have any of these inconveniences.’