The Sunshine Cruise Company

by John Niven

  They embraced. Susan was grateful for Jill being there – she could think of no one less likely to engage with the topic of how Barry had died than Jill Worth. Jill, who couldn’t even say ‘shit’. Susan felt … she felt lovely actually. Lovely and warm and kind of floaty.

  ‘Oh, Susan, I’m so sorry for … goodness. Just everything you’re going through right now.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s all just … horrible.’ She blew her nose. Susan noticed Jill’s eyes were already red from crying.

  In truth, being here was costing Jill a great deal more than anyone knew. As she looked around the sad room, her ears full of the music of death, it was such a tiny hop for her imagination to place her here again, in the very near future, in far, far worse circumstances: the tiny coffin. ‘Jamie was with us for such a short time, and yet he filled our hearts with such love.’ Her daughter, breaking. Broken.

  ‘Excuse me, sorry.’ Jill headed for the toilets to get it out of her system. Susan looked across the room and saw Julie and Ethel in a pew towards the back – back-of-the-bus kind of girls, both of them. She smiled and Julie broke off from whispering something to Ethel to give her a tiny thumbs up. Susan nodded. The Valium Julie had given her to get through the day was working very well indeed. She’d never taken Valium before. Floaty.

  Over in the pew Julie went back to whispering. ‘It’s a nightmare. I mean, Barry and I never got on but still, I –’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ethel said. ‘Not how you’d choose to go, is it? A vibrator the size of a fire hydrant exploding up your bum?’

  ‘Ethel!’ Julie hissed. ‘Not that. I mean I never thought he’d leave her in this mess. Barry. Mr Money Manager. Roger, their solicitor, thinks there’s a chance she’ll lose the house!’

  Was Julie experiencing a vague kind of thrill at the thought of her friend falling this far, as far as she had? No. No, definitely not.

  ‘Poor cow,’ Ethel said, scanning the room, her eyes settling on a new arrival, a tall, tanned lean man in his early sixties, with a head of thick silver hair and a matching moustache. He was wearing a well-cut dark suit as he wove through the throng purposefully, craning his neck, clearly looking for someone. ‘Hold the phone,’ Ethel said, licking her lips, ‘who’s the sex machine?’ An elderly woman in the pew in front shifted uncomfortably, turning a little to glare in Ethel’s direction. Ethel returned her gaze evenly with her patented ‘Can I help you?’ expression.

  ‘Ethel!’ Julie squinted across the room. Bloody hell, she thought. ‘Terry bloody Russell,’ she whispered.

  ‘Who hell he?’ Ethel said.

  ‘We were at school together. Haven’t seen him in years. He was a handsome bugger.’

  ‘I wouldn’t kick it out of bed now,’ Ethel whispered.

  ‘Well, yeah,’ Julie said. He’d aged well, Terry, no doubt about it. ‘He lived abroad for years. Did something fairly dubious in import/export. Made lots of money too, I heard. A real shagger in his day. What’s he doing here?’

  ‘Ooh, handsome, rich and mysterious?’ Ethel said. ‘You reckon he’d let me sit on his face for an hour or so?’

  Across the room Susan was gazing at the light coming softly through a high stained-glass window, thinking how pretty it looked. Yes, Valium and plenty of it – that might be the way to go. She wasn’t even thinking about the second meeting she’d had with Roger last night, the meeting where Roger had told her they’d have to go into the bank for another meeting. All these ‘meetings’. Susan had gone through most of her adult life not really doing that much of anything and now all she seemed to do was have meetings all day. Roger. The undertaker. The caterers. The bank. Roger thought there was ‘a chance’ she could keep the house. It was the only asset she had, and in itself not worth quite enough to pay off the bank, the credit card companies, the loans, the revenue, the VAT man and the client accounts Barry had ‘borrowed’ from, but if she could borrow against the house, get some capital to allow her to … what had Barry always called it? Restructure her finances. Besides – it wouldn’t look very good from a PR point of view, Roger thought, for the Lanchester Bank to kick a poor widow (almost a pensioner) out of her home for something she knew nothing about. Of course the onus would be on Roger and Susan to prove she knew nothing about all Barry’s dealings. They’d just have to count on her good character. (But hadn’t Barry had a ‘good character’ too? Susan heard a tiny voice saying this, somewhere at the back of her head, trying to break through the warm candyfloss mist of the Valium.)

  Suddenly she heard another voice – real, much closer – saying, ‘Susan? Susan, I’m so sorry for your loss.’

  She turned to see a handsome, tanned face. A moustache. It took her a moment. ‘Terry? Terry Russell? It’s been …’

  ‘Don’t even say it,’ he said, leaning in to kiss her lightly on the cheek. His aftershave was subtle, just there. Expensive.

  ‘How have you been?’ Susan asked.

  ‘Oh, fine, fine.’

  ‘You’ve heard the whole sorry tale, I assume?’

  ‘Well,’ Terry said, ‘the old jungle drums have been pounding, yes. I subtracted about 70 per cent of what I heard, but it still sounds pretty bad. How are you bearing up?’

  ‘I … I don’t really know. I know it sounds like the worst cliché but … I keep thinking I’m going to wake up.’

  The vicar was walking towards the front now, the last of the mourners taking their seats. ‘Look,’ Terry was saying, pressing something into her palm, ‘I’ll probably shoot off straight after, I’m not much good at these things. But if you ever fancy taking your mind off things, I’ve got a yacht down at Sands these days. The sea can be very … calming. Come over and I’ll take you out sometime.’

  Susan looked down at the card – ‘Terry Russell, CEO, Russell Shipping’ – and then back up at Terry. He smiled, almost apologetically. ‘Terry Russell,’ Susan said. ‘If I didn’t know better I’d say you were hitting on someone at their husband’s funeral.’

  ‘Just trying to offer a little comfort.’ He grinned. Great teeth.

  ‘Ever the good Samaritan, eh?’

  ‘That’s me. Look, I’ll see you later. OK?’

  Susan watched him go – scandalised and amused in equal measure. She tucked the business card into the folds of her purse. And then the vicar was placing his Prayer Book on the pulpit and it was time for it all to begin.

  Or end, rather.

  She wondered if Julie would let her have another Valium.

  Later that night, after everyone had gone home, Susan walked through the house, turning off lights, picking up empty glasses, straightening cushions. She hadn’t had very many people back after the service. Julie and Ethel, the Robertsons, Roger, Tom and Clare obviously, who were now upstairs in the spare bedroom. She paused in the downstairs hallway, next to what used to be the ‘telephone table’, way back when, before cordless, before mobiles. There was a framed photograph – her and Barry and Tom, on the beach in … St Ives was it? Tom was about five or six, so, the late eighties. They were all smiling but Barry’s smile, it seemed to Susan now, was more of a sneer, a sly, mocking grin.

  Since the 1980s.

  Betamax.

  Bought for seven thousand pounds.

  A lifetime of lies. Everything built on nothing.

  She checked the front door was locked, turned the hall light off, slipped out of her shoes, picked them up and padded silently upstairs. The habits of a lifetime.

  Coming along the hallway she noticed the light was still on in the spare bedroom down at the end – just a crack through the slightly open door. She could hear voices, voices that had the unmistakable tone of an argument being conducted at whispering level. She edged closer down the hall towards her own bedroom, then past it, closer to that crack of light.

  Eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves, Susan …

  Tom’s voice first, strained, an edge to it. ‘For God’s sake, Clare, I’m just saying, if the worst comes to the worst, if s
he has to sell the house and she’s got nowhere else to go …’

  ‘And all I said was surely she’d be eligible for some kind of council housing?’

  ‘I’m not packing my mum off to some grotty council estate!’

  ‘Jesus – don’t be such a bloody snob!’

  ‘That bastard. That dirty fucking bastard. I can’t believe he did this to her!’

  ‘All I’m saying is that I don’t know many women who’d be thrilled at the thought of living with their mother-in-law.’

  ‘It might not even come to that. Look, can we talk about this in the morning please?’

  Susan tiptoed away, her shoes clutched to her chest. She closed her bedroom door very, very quietly.

  SIXTEEN

  THE WROXHAM HIGH Street branch of the Lanchester Bank, on a suitably rainy Tuesday afternoon in late May. It was a warm day, twenty-one degrees (or the low seventies in the old money Susan tended to think in), and the rain was almost tropical – great fat drops.

  Susan and Roger were sitting facing the manager, a Mr Alan Glass. The ‘Mr’ felt faintly ridiculous to Susan – he was just a freckled boy in a suit and tie – and she’d felt relieved when he said, ‘Please, call me Alan.’ He looked to be about Tom’s age and it occurred to her that he probably hadn’t even been born when she and Barry opened their account here. He had a stack of paperwork in front of him, as did Roger. Susan had her hands clasped in her lap as she listened.

  ‘I’m afraid, on that front,’ Alan was saying, ‘our hands are tied. HMRC have already frozen the account pending their investigation. It looks likely, if the figures you’ve given me are correct, that pretty much all of the money in there will go to them anyway.’

  ‘What about the flat?’ Roger asked. The flat, Susan thought. The Sex Dungeon.

  ‘Already remortgaged to the hilt, I’m afraid. Twice in the last five years. There’s no equity.’

  There was a knock at the door and a girl’s face appeared. ‘Alan? Sorry to interrupt, but Securicor are here. We need you to open the strongroom.’

  Alan looked up. ‘Oh – is it, is this the last Tuesday of the month already?’ He looked at the clock on the wall: 2 p.m. exactly. ‘Sorry, will you excuse me for a moment?’ he said, turning back to Roger and Susan. He went out into the hallway. Susan overheard another girl saying, ‘Is that the supermarket takings? I’ll get Gerry to come and help.’ ‘Thanks, Katie.’

  Susan and Roger sat there in silence for a moment. The framed photograph of Alan’s wife on the desk. The calendar. The clock ticking. Roger gave her a weak smile then the door was opening and he was coming back in, saying, ‘Sorry, where were we?’

  ‘If not the flat the main house then,’ Roger said, fishing through his pile, ‘the primary residence. There’s no mortgage on that. It must be worth six or seven hundred thousand easily. If we could remortgage for even half of that amount –’

  ‘Yes, well,’ Alan said. ‘How do you propose to meet the repayments?’

  ‘From the savings account.’

  ‘Which, as I explained, is frozen. And likely to all be due to creditors.’

  Susan cleared her throat. They both turned to look at her. ‘I could get a job. I have some, um, secretarial experience.’ The two men stared at her like she was a child calling a telethon to offer the contents of her piggy bank to try and end African famine.

  ‘I’m afraid –’ Alan tapped at a calculator – ‘on a remortgage of, what, three hundred thousand? We’d need to have proof of an income of at least seventy thousand pounds a year. And, even then, at your a …’ He thought how best to phrase it. ‘At your time of … with the usual term being twenty-five years …’

  Susan looked up. There was a poster on the wall behind the desk. It featured a happy, smiling, black version of Alan with his arm around a beaming young couple. The girl was holding the keys to a house, the pretty house in the background of the photograph. She was pregnant. In bright red type across the top was the slogan ‘YOUR FUTURE MATTERS … TO US’.

  ‘Anyway, I’m afraid all of this is something of a moot point.’ Alan Glass patted another stack of papers. ‘With all the other debts we’re looking at here, the loans, the credit cards, the allegations of fraud, we’re almost certainly looking at a bankruptcy situation. In which case any kind of remortgage would be impossible. We’d love to help, we really would, but –’

  Susan laughed, a short, bleak bark, and said, ‘I’ve been a customer here for over thirty years.’

  ‘I understand how difficult the situation is, Susan,’ Alan said.

  ‘Actually I’d much prefer it if you called me Mrs Frobisher if it’s all the same to you. You sit here, getting rich off people like me, and the minute we come to you for help, it’s –’

  ‘Susan,’ Roger said, touching her arm gently. She pulled it away angrily.

  ‘Look,’ Alan said, shooting his cuffs, sitting upright and suddenly becoming Mr Glass in the process, ‘Mrs Frobisher …’

  Julie hurried towards the ringing doorbell, thinking Keep your bloody hair on. She’d been slicing a tomato for her late lunch of a tomato on toast. (Julie had to shop and budget very, very carefully these days.) When she made these humble meals she often found her interior monologue talking to her in the manner of a TV chef – Ramsay or Jamie Oliver – explaining what they were doing to the camera. ‘We’re going to make sure the toast is really hot, straight off the grill, and then some lovely thick slices of tomato, plenty of salt and pepper, and …’ It made it seem more glamorous somehow.

  She had to travel the entire length of her flat towards the front door, from the kitchenette, through the living room and down the hall. It took her just twelve paces and ten seconds to accomplish this. She opened the door to see Susan standing there in the pouring, pouring rain. She was trying to speak. ‘I … uh … uh …’ Christ, Julie thought. Has she been hit by a car or something? Susan was soaked through and her mascara had streaked all down her face. Panda eyes? Her eyes were those of a panda in August with very bad hay fever who has run out of antihistamines about an hour after they’ve been told their whole family has been killed. ‘Uh … they … I …’

  ‘Easy, easy, darling. What’s happened?’ She pulled her friend into the hallway, out of the rain. Susan was like a five-year-old in the middle of one of the biggest crying jags known to man: struggling to get the words out between racking sobs, almost like she was permanently riding the crest of a huge sneeze.

  ‘Th … they … THEY’RE GOING TO TAKE MY HOUSE!’

  She fell forward, collapsing weeping in Julie’s arms.

  SEVENTEEN

  MUCH LATER, THE windows were open to the humid night, the coffee table littered with dishes, glasses, bottles and an overflowing ashtray, Julie having broken her own rule about smoking in the flat. Even Susan had taken one! When had she last seen Susan with a cigarette in her mouth? Before decimalisation probably. They were slouched on the floor, out of the Smirnoff now and on to the Popol vodka: a cheeky little number Julie had picked up at a petrol station. A tenner for a litre. Mixed with orange juice it was fine, just about killed the tang of formaldehyde, Julie thought, and Julie knew a thing or two about cocktails. Also, Julie thought, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Susan Frobisher drink quite this much. She was knocking it back. ‘Tango in the Night’ by Fleetwood Mac played softly in the background on Julie’s little CD boom box. The CD. Another relic.

  ‘Little shit looked about fourteen,’ Susan said, hiccuping as she topped herself up. ‘Your future matters TO US!’

  ‘Bastards,’ Julie said. ‘They wreck the world, get bailed out by the taxpayer, and as soon as you’re in trouble it’s “Fuck you. Fuck you very much.”’

  ‘I’m not kidding. He was younger than my Tom.’

  ‘I’ve got one of them at work. Kendal. Administrator. Horrible cow. Straight out of college and given their own little fiefdoms to run.’

  There was a pause as they both sipped their drinks. Susan sighed. ‘Homeless and
penniless. I didn’t see this one coming, Jules.’

  ‘Join the club. It wasn’t exactly my master plan to wind up here …’ Julie gestured around her, at the tiny flat, four small rooms: bedroom, living room, kitchen and bathroom. (At least, she’d thought, the Coalition’s new bedroom tax wouldn’t hit her.) ‘You work all your life and …’

  ‘Come on,’ Susan said. ‘Let’s be honest, I never really did a day’s work in my life.’

  ‘Well, there is that, yes.’

  ‘At least you did things, Julie. Got out there. Saw the world. Australia, America, London …’

  ‘Yeah, well, you can’t eat good times and all that. You had nearly forty decent years though.’ Julie shook a fresh cigarette from her pack of Ambassador: the cheapest brand available at the local shop. She’d have killed for a lovely Marlboro Light.

  ‘But it was all a lie. I was married to … to a sex addict.’

  A pause. The two women looked at each and then, at exactly the same moment, both of them buckled with laughter. Very quickly they were rolling on the carpet, tears running down their faces. ‘Oh, oh, have you met my husband?’ Susan said, flattening a hand on her chest, feigning cocktail-party introduction. ‘He’s a sex addict!’

  ‘Shurrup,’ Julie gasped. ‘Stop it, please, I can’t breathe.’ She wiped a tear away and reached for the bottle. ‘Here.’ She poured them both another. ‘Shit, we’re out of OJ.’

  ‘Oh sod it,’ Susan said. She picked up her glass and pounded it back neat, grimacing, shuddering, shaking from side to side, falling over and kicking her feet in the air.

  ‘SUSAN!’ Julie said, amazed.