by Judy Astley
‘I don’t know,’ Rachel said. ‘He just said to meet him here, him and some mates. Or, rather, his bredrin.’ She felt odd with Ned’s vocabulary. Country music might not be her, but neither was this. Nor, she suspected, was it really Ned. Some of the urban expressions he used sounded as if he were just trying them on, like he’d heard them but didn’t own them.
Emmy snorted. ‘Bredrin? Is he, like, a rappah?’
‘No – well, I don’t think so. He said it’s the “local vernacular”.’
‘He sounds stupidly posh. Or poshly stupid. I bet he doesn’t talk like that at his swanky boarding school. It’ll be all fagging and Matron.’ Emmy sniffed. She eased her aching foot out of its tight boot and back in again, wincing with pain.
‘Shut up, Em, you haven’t even met him yet. You don’t know what kind of school he goes to, neither do I. You can’t prejudge.’
This was a huge mistake, involving Emmy. Rachel should have kept him to herself, her own private non-school, non-home life. But he’d said, almost ordered, ‘Bring a mate.’ So she had. She didn’t want to look like she hadn’t got any.
The two girls hovered outside an antique shop beside the pub, looking at old silver clocks that were of no interest to them, nervously putting off the moment when they had to venture, well underage, into an unfamiliar bar, with each of them pretending to the other that they were perfectly nonchalant about this.
‘Yo, schoolgirl!’ And there he was, in between two boys with hair just like his. ‘These are Baz and Jaz. And ooh look,’ Rachel tried not to feel a tweak of jealousy as he gave Emmy his very best smile, the one she thought was just for her, ‘a little gothette! Are your knickers all black and velvety as well?’
‘Frig off, that’s to’ally gash,’ Emmy told him, showing him her middle finger.
‘Soz. Didn’t mean to vex you.’
‘Well, you did. You well jarrin’ me, man.’ Emmy was scowling.
‘Safe!’ Ned nodded, approving. Rachel felt unexpectedly troubled by this exchange, somehow left out. Emmy didn’t usually talk like this. Was she laughing at him or genuinely looking for him to like her?
‘Drink, girls?’ he asked, suddenly sounding, Rachel thought, like someone who’d just come offstage and was back to normal. That was fine by her – she felt he was back with her again. ‘Shall we go in or hang outside here?’
‘Out here,’ Baz (or possibly Jaz) said, producing a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. The other one carefully pulled out chairs from under a metal table and motioned the girls to sit down.
‘Me and Baz’ll get the beers. You two want wine? They have a bracing little Pinot Grigio.’
Emmy giggled. ‘Just Coke for me, please.’
‘And me, please,’ Rachel said.
‘You sure? You got ID with you?’
‘Er, no. Forgot,’ Rachel said, feeling a potentially disastrous age-revealing moment creeping up. ‘Anyway, I really do just fancy Coke. Hot day.’
They spread themselves out on the small veranda in front of the pub. Rachel could see the flickery eyes of Baz and Jaz looking her and Emmy up and down as if absorbing every physical detail. She pulled the front of her little vest top up so they couldn’t peer down her front and find her inadequately endowed. Emmy was curvier and the lacing on the front of her dress pulled her in and up, basque-style. This was all going a bit wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be a competition. Emmy was, for once, meant to be the one who was tagging along, just there to be fun and friendly but not to take over the attention. Rachel wanted Ned to claim her, to put his arm round her, say something that was just between the two of them. Not that she was his girlfriend or anything.
‘So you cotchin’ at your pater’s place?’ Ned turned just to her and asked at last.
‘Pater?’ Emmy scoffed, accepting a cigarette from Baz/Jaz.
‘Yah. And? What do you call yours?’ Ned challenged.
Emmy shrugged. ‘Just, y’know, Dad?’
‘Ordinary,’ Ned drawled. ‘The ’rents like exaggerated respec’. That way they never know if you’re ripping the piss.’ He laughed and helped himself to one of Jaz’s cigarettes. Baz flicked his silver lighter at him.
‘Why would I want to rip the piss? I like my dad.’
‘Me too,’ Rachel chimed in, ‘though it’s hard only living with him part-time. But I’m going on holiday with him at the weekend. We’re going to Ireland.’
‘Funny place to go for a holiday,’ Baz drawled. ‘Doesn’t it, like, rain a lot? What’s wrong with the Maldives or something?’
‘We’re going in a caravan. Horse-drawn, you know?’
‘Just you and your dad?’ Ned asked.
‘Well … me and him and … a friend of his.’
Later, Rachel told herself that this was easier, quicker, than explaining in detail; that she wouldn’t have minded Ned knowing (Emmy already did), but she didn’t see why she should explain the sexual orientations of her various family members to a bunch of total strangers. It was none of their business. All the same, at the time she felt like she’d betrayed Marco and James, hugely.
‘I’ll miss you,’ Ned said, squeezing her hand and leaning closer to her.
‘It’s only a week.’
‘A whole long week.’ He pushed his chair back and stood up, pulling Rachel with him. ‘Come with me for a sec, just down the road. Got something to show you.’
‘Oo er.’ Baz and Jaz snorted and leered. Emmy gave them a look and they stopped, instantly.
‘I’ll bring her back, no sweat,’ Ned said to Emmy, who shrugged. ‘I know my way home if you don’t,’ she told him.
Just down the road and round the corner, Ned drew her into the doorway of a closed-down shop and put his arms round her, pulling her close. She snuggled into him, scenting fabric conditioner mixed with coconut hair conditioner, the same one she used.
‘Don’t forget me while you’re away,’ he said to her, running his hand down the side of her hip and sliding a thumb just under the hem of her flowery shorts. When he kissed her he pulled her in hard against him, jolting her so that her lower lip crashed against his teeth, and then his tongue stroked against her mouth, soothing and exciting at the same time. ‘Mmm … nice,’ he murmured into her neck, kissed her some more, then let her go, rather abruptly, taking her hand and leading her back to the pub where Baz and Jaz were smirking at her. She could feel herself going pink and still trembling from Ned’s kiss.
‘That was quick,’ Jaz said, leering.
‘Well, you know …’ Ned grinned at him. ‘Gotta go,’ he told Rachel, his hand on her bum. ‘Folks are having drinks and they’ve booked me and Baz to dress up and do the waitering. Cheap labour. See you when you get back?’
‘Oh, er … yes. Will text.’
‘Yep. Oh and party time, on eighteenth at mine. Results day and folks away. Celebrate or commiserate, your choice. Have you two got A-level results coming as well?’
‘Not really. Big stuff is next year,’ Emmy replied quickly.
‘Oh, right. Just ASs then – doesn’t really count so much, does it?’
Rachel rather thought it would, when the time came, but let it go in the interests of Ned and his friends not discovering that she and Emmy hadn’t even taken their GCSEs yet.
‘Eighteenth is my birthday too,’ she said, deflecting the subject.
‘Oh, is it?’ He smiled. ‘Extra celebration all round then.’
‘Hey, he, like, so wants to shag you,’ Emmy declared as she and Rachel walked back up to Notting Hill to catch the train home.
‘He wouldn’t if he knew I wasn’t even fifteen yet.’ Rachel felt a bit scared.
‘Well, there you are then. If it all gets difficult and you decide you don’t want to, that’s your way out. You can just tell him your age.’
‘Yeah, course I can,’ Rachel said, unconvinced. ‘Easy as that.’
TWENTY
BECAUSE VIOLA WAS so occupied sorting the house (in which every surface immediately fuzzed up with cl
ouds of dust from nowhere the moment she unpacked a box), she was just about managing to keep at a distance the horrible dread that each day’s post would bring more evidence that there were still crazed Rhys admirers determined she should never have the chance for a peaceful life. Saturday’s delivery had given her a scare in the form of a bright pink envelope landing on the doormat, but it had only contained a Happy Moving Day card from Amanda and Leo, which was sweet of them. Over the weekend and through the first night she and Rachel slept back at Bell Cottage nothing had gone horribly wrong, apart from Rachel wailing that she’d left her hair straighteners at the flat.
Now, as darkness fell, Viola was trying hard not to see hostile shadows lurking in the gloom. When she came back from that night’s planned illicit gardening adventure with Greg she would be sleeping alone in the house, and it was going to be quite a test as to how safe and secure she felt, not just on a purely physical level. Rachel had decamped to Emmy’s for the night, smiling an awful lot at nothing in particular and looking almost plumply stuffed with teenage secrets, but not even remotely suspecting that her mother might have one or two of her own. It occurred to Viola that back in her own youth, she hadn’t ever wondered about Naomi, either – she was wondering now, though. Mothers, when she was younger, used to be just mothers, though hers had always looked a bit different, a bit like photos she’d seen of Juliette Greco from the fifties, wearing a duffle coat, lots of black and (in one picture) carrying one end of a banner on an anti-nuclear march. But at some point Naomi had given up the drab look. She’d started dressing in bold colours and still did, several times over the years accidentally becoming completely on-trend fashion-wise with her habitual blocks of bright shades.
The recently revived memories of Uncle Oliver had made Viola think about him, too, in a way she had never bothered to before. He hadn’t been a blood relative – so what had he been to Naomi? Just a friend? Someone who liked to help with the blokey stuff like changing plugs and car tyres, out of kindness to a youngish widow? A gay ‘walker’ to go out with for fun? Or her lover, and, if that, why hadn’t he moved in or married her? She didn’t remember any other apparently unattached men being around so much in her childhood. Lots of female friends: Naomi was always out and about with those, off to galleries and parties, but not any particular man.
Oliver had even been with them on Viola’s first day at the local infants’ school. She had a hazy memory of him and Naomi all big and tall each side of her, holding her hands, doing that counting to three and swinging her in the air thing to make her giggle. She had a memory that as they’d swung her she’d swooshed against her mother’s full, flower-patterned skirt, which she’d now think of as wonderfully vintage 1950s. It must have been quite something back in the 1980s, when everyone else was probably going around in navy blue shoulder-padded power suits.
Naomi and Oliver had seemed more nervous about her starting school than she had been. She had a vivid mental picture of the two adult faces (her mother’s hennaed hair topped by a green hat with cherries on it, Oliver’s long black hair curling over his forehead), peering through the half-glazed classroom door looking worried, while she greedily inhaled the thrilling scents of Play-Doh and wax crayon. Other than Oliver, she only remembered Naomi’s wide and chatty circle of women friends who left vivid lipstick marks on coffee cups and smoked in the garden. She would ask more about Oliver. Surely her mother would at least want to talk about the paintings? Or maybe Kate, being so much older, would have some idea about him.
There was something to be said for a garden full of impenetrable nettles, brambles and waist-high weeds, Viola considered as the night closed in and she reluctantly (given that the house still felt pretty damn hot) fastened and carefully locked all the downstairs doors and shutters. Only the most determined lunatic would clamber through that lot to get at the back of the house. As for the front, short of moving right away to some soulless gated community, there wasn’t much she could do about anyone who was inclined to tie memorial ribbons to the magnolia. You just had to feel sorry for whoever it was, really, she told herself, trying to find a generous side to being an obsessive’s target. And she was sure it was just the one person – was that more or less scary than the previous gang of idiots?
The late-evening air felt barely cooler than the scorching day had been. Viola had needed a long, cool shower after another day of sorting and putting away; she had, finally, folded the last of the cardboard packing boxes and stashed them in the garage, not quite able to send them off to the recycling in case she needed to move again in a hurry. If she hadn’t had that stupid kitten card, she’d have happily consigned the boxes to the recycling and cosied herself into Bell Cottage for the long foreseeable. However, although she didn’t really anticipate a whole lot of trouble (the cards, in bright, unthreatening daylight could be construed as quite a feeble, last-ditch gesture somehow, compared with the immediate post-Rhys onslaught of spite, though it was still depressing and hurtful), she still felt wary. So please, she’d appealed to whichever gods were on duty at the time, as she stripped the tape off the final box and flattened it down for storing, could you possibly organize it so there are no more hassles? Is it too much to ask that Rachel and I have a peaceful life, the sort other – normal – people have?
Soon after 10 p.m., Greg was leaning on the Bell Cottage doorframe, head to foot in black. ‘So – are you ready to come out and subvert the Highways Department’s massed-begonia plans?’ he asked. He was looking just as when Viola had first met him, that mad night on the roundabout, except that this time she knew his eager smile wasn’t that of a crazed murderer spotting the perfect victim. Or at least she assumed not. You didn’t – she guessed – plant a row of beautifully espaliered fruit trees and a mass of nasturtiums as a friendly gesture towards someone you planned to garrotte, unless this came under extreme and perverse softening up.
In the doorway the sun-gilded ends of his hair sparkled under the porch light, and he was framed by a mass of overhanging and overblown white roses. It flashed across her mind that this would make a glorious photograph – the contrast of the tender and the tough, shining beneath the Bell Cottage lamplight. Except it was the thorny roses that could inflict the most pain, not Greg. ‘Just Friends’ may or may not have described what her mother and Oliver Stonehouse had been, but it was definitely going to be her own mantra from now on. She wasn’t about to go through any kind of man angst again, not in this lifetime.
‘Yes, I’m ready! And look at us both, kitted out for horticultural warfare, all in black, though I think you’re short of one Che Guevara beret,’ she told him, carefully double-locking the front door after her. Should she have invited him in for a drink first? She felt strangely shy about the idea of having him on her premises. This house was intimately her in a way the flat at Naomi’s simply hadn’t been. She could imagine him padding about the place, looking at the books on her shelves, checking out her CD collection and mocking her mixture of Puccini and vintage punk.
‘I may be a well-tough guerrilla gardener, but it would crush my coiffeur, darling,’ he said, running his fingers through his hair as he opened the car door for her. ‘And you have to have a certain youthful insouciance to carry off a beret with style.’
‘The way you say that reminds me of … oh, just someone I know.’ She laughed, thinking how like Marco he’d sounded. Very fleetingly she wondered – maybe Greg was gay as well? No, she didn’t think so – not that either way affected her, in any case.
The Land Rover had a damp earthy smell of rich loam and wet dog.
‘Sorry about the niff – Mickey’s had her stinky old spaniel in here,’ Greg said as he drove out on to the road.
‘Mickey’s dog? Not yours?’
‘Hell, no. I like dogs but I wouldn’t want one. They’re so damn needy, always looking at you with those huge wet eyes, and just when you think they lerve you they go and eat your shoes.’
Viola managed not to blurt out that she’d had a husband who’d be
en a lot like that, though it was on the tip of her tongue. Damn Rhys – awful as he’d been, she couldn’t bring herself to say something so heartlessly frivolous. He’d been someone’s beloved son, a brother and – for some poor unknown woman – a lover worth running off with.
‘So – where are we going?’ she asked as she braced her foot firmly against the side of the door. The Land Rover didn’t seem to have a lot in the way of suspension, and it bounced and bumped its way over every tiny pothole.
‘Tesco’s,’ he said, turning briefly and giving her the smile.
‘Tesco’s?’ It sounded too ordinary, surely. ‘Right. So not a spare patch of earth outside Buckingham Palace? Not the hanging baskets of Downing Street?’
‘Yep. Tesco’s. Hey, are you disappointed? Sorry. I know it’s not the most romantic of venues to take a beautiful woman for a night out, but it is the big Tesco’s, not the titchy little Express by the station. So please don’t think I’m not pushing the boat out for you here.’
‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ she replied, overlooking the reference to ‘beautiful’. After all, he’d seen her at three in the morning after half a night in a police cell, so he could only be joking. ‘I mean it’s not as if it’s some kind of … date exactly, is it?’ When she thought about it, Viola felt quite relieved to be heading somewhere both nearish and fairly public. She hadn’t told anyone where she was going, or even that she’d be out. Rachel was over at Emmy’s so she didn’t need to know, but Kate and Miles would have been appalled. Even Marco would have done his best furrowed-brow look. Ever since the Rhys fans had started tormenting her they’d been insistent that her personal safety had to come first, that she should let someone know where she was going at all times.
It made sense on one level, but with Kate too frequently reminding her that ‘you never know who’s out there’, as if every moment of darkness were loaded with peril, she often felt as if she was expected to ask permission before so much as putting the bin bags out. No wonder her default setting was, until so recently, to stay at home. Tunnelling out could be such a palaver. If she’d told Kate about tonight there’d have been a whole long list of questions, starting with Who with, Where to, and eventually … Why? To be honest, if she had to explain this quest, she wouldn’t blame Kate for that last one. Random gardening in the dark wasn’t really the sanest thing to do.
