by Sarah May
‘What colourwhat?’
‘What colour are you having the walls painted?’
Beatrice was shoutingMargery was sure Beatrice was shouting at her, and there was no need to do that; there was nothing partial about her hearing.
‘Magnolia,’ she said, surprised Beatrice had even asked.
‘What colour was it before?’
‘Magnolia.’
A pause. ‘Margeryis Kate there?’
‘She went out,’ Margery said, making it sound like she’d gone shopping and not to work as a clinical psychologist.
‘I was just phoning to see if Finn got into St Anthony’sKate said they were meant to hear by today.’
Finnwas Robert Rob or Robbie? ‘The letter came.’
‘And?’
Margery paused; suddenly thrilled by the notion that she had a small piece of the Hunter family’s future in her hands that Beatrice wasn’t yet aware of. ‘Well…’ she trailed off, provocatively. She could get Edith to the point sometimes where she was begging, her cheap dentures sliding around inside her mouth across saliva-ridden gums.
‘Did he get in?’
‘The letter said he did.’ What did that mean? Margery wasn’t sure, but she felt herself scanning the lounge to see if Kate had left the letter anywhere. She wouldn’t mind a look at that letter.
‘Thank God,’ Beatrice breathed down the phone. ‘Kate was talking about home schooling if Finn didn’t get in…leaving Londonthe works,’ she carried on.
‘Leaving London?’
‘Well, now she won’t need to bother.’
‘Leaving London for where?’
‘I don’t know, Margery, you know those twoKate was going on about America, and Rob…’
She called him Rob.
‘…was talking about New Zealand. They talked themselves into a taste for bigger things; who knows, maybe they’ll end up going anyway,’ Beatrice concluded cheerfully.
Margery was shocked. New Zealand? Robert never said anything to her about New Zealand.
‘I’ll try and catch Kate before she starts workand you must come down here to see usget a blast of fresh air.’ She paused. ‘Come on your own, if you like, I mean if you get sick of family life. I can always come and get youjust give us a bell.’
Margery didn’t respond to this; still hadn’t responded by the time Beatrice rang off. New Zealand. She tried phoning Edith, but Edith didn’t answer.
Martina appeared in the lounge doorway.
Margery stared helplessly at her before blurting out, ‘New Zealand’s on the other side of the world.’
Martina smiled and moved cautiously into the room with the hoover, watched by Margery. After a while she put the hoover away and disappeared into the kitchen. Margery remained in the lounge, staring at the phone.
‘I go now,’ Martina called out.
‘Already?’ Margery responded, involuntarily, walking slowly into the hallway.
Martina was at the front door, the white envelope in her hand. ‘Now I have much ironing to do for Mr Catano.’
‘Catano?’
‘A bit Korean, I think.’
‘Korean?’ Margery said as Martina opened the front door, thinking briefly of cousin Tom.
Martina pushed her bike past sunflowers that Kate had let Findlay plant and that Margery thought would look ridiculous by July when they reached shoulder-height.
‘I see you again next week.’
‘Maybe,’ Margery called out, unable to think about next week when she could barely keep her mind fixed on what was happening the rest of todayespecially after hearing about New Zealand.
‘And pleaseI fed the cat.’
Margery was about to say something about the cat when she heard the door to No. 20the Jamaican’s doorstart to open. She went quickly back inside, slamming the door to No. 22 shut and going into the lounge where she watched carefully, through slatted blinds Martina hadn’t forgotten to dust, as Mr Hamilton moved slowly over to his recycling bin and put an empty milk carton in it.
The sun glanced off his gold wristwatch as he turned round, shaking his head at a private thought before looking up suddenly, straight at her, smiling.
Scowling, Margery backed away from the window, almost running into the hallway where she slid the chain across the front door as quietly as she could, then waited. No sound of movement on the other side. Then, after another minute, the front door to No. 20 was shut.
Scared as well as preoccupied, Margery went into the kitchen to pick up where she’d left off with the corned beef pie. She sliced an onion over the pastry base and went to get the corned beef out the cupboard before remembering that she’d already done that. There it was on the bench. Only the tins were empty. When had she done that? She looked from the empty tins to the empty pie case.
Where was the corned beef?
Slowly her eyes took a downward turn to Ivan’s bowl, which was full.
Chapter 5
Robert sat staring about the Ellington Technology College staff room waiting for Kate to call him about St Anthony’sand whether Findlay had got a place.
The seat next to him was blue and covered in cigarette burns from the days when staff were allowed to smoke. A Swiss cheese plant belonging to Les Davies, deputy headthat had been there as long as Leswas on top of a filing cabinet behind him that nobody had opened for years, and that blocked out what little natural light had the heart to try and make its way into the room.
The bell had rung and the dust had resettled. An art teacher with a cold was snivelling in a corner and muttering at a memo Sellotaped to the wall while inadvertently slopping the sleeves of her jumper into her coffee. The memo was from the Metropolitan Police warning staff at the school of a new gang whose initiation ceremony comprised driving a car in the dark without putting the car’s headlights on. If another driver on the road flashed the car, the wannabe gang member had to pursue it and shoot the driver. Bettina, the new geography teacher from South Africa, was looking at a property investment magazine’s special Romania supplement, which was the only place in Europe on her salary where she could afford to buy.
After staring for another second, transfixed by a ripped corner of carpet tile the same helpless blue as the chairs, Robert hauled himself to his feet. Bettina looked up from the computer-generated image of a Romanian shepherd’s hut after modernisation, and stareddistractedat Robert.
‘I’m meant to be teaching now,’ he said.
Bettina didn’t say anything to this; she just nodded and went back to the modernised shepherd’s hut.
The art teacher carried on muttering and Robert left the room, the smell of burnt coffee, frustration and despair replaced immediately by the smell of the next generationwhoever they were.
When he got to his classroom, the door was open and the kids were inside, unaccountably silent, until Robert realised that the squat man in the corridor outside, staring through the window opposite the door, was Les the deputy head. Despite bearing an uncanny resemblance to Goebbels, he was the only incorruptible thing in the school and, because of this, the children were terrified of him. Les was from the Rhondda Valley and used to get heavily involved in school musicalswhen they used to have school musicals…when they used to have a music department.
Most people found Les aggressive; some of them even found him tyrannical, but Robert and Les shared a mutual, hard-earned respect for each other, and Robert always found him protective.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said to Les’s back, jerking his thumb at the classroom full of children and suddenly aware that he was out of breath even though he hadn’t been running. ‘I got caught up, and…sorry,’ he said again.
Les sighed, but didn’t turn round.
He carried on standing, motionless, as if he had finally come to the conclusion that while he didn’t have a life, he did have an existence and an existence, if nothing else, did at least provide respite from having to decide whether he was alive or in fact dead.
‘What are you doi
ng with them?’ he said at last, still without turning round.
‘Seamus Heaney,’ Robert said, automatically.
‘I never did like Seamus HeaneyI think I tried to. Anyway, I unlocked the classroom and got them in for you.’
‘Thanksthanks for that.’
‘I was passing and Keisha was banging Shanique’s head repetitively against the wall.’
‘Yeah, Keisha does that.’
‘Ellie Palmer’s in this class,’ Les said, suddenly changing the subject.
‘Ellie’s—’
‘A brilliant and messy girl,’ Les finished quietly for him. It was Les and Robert, jointly, who were behind getting Ellie to apply for the St Paul’s sixth-form scholarship. He turned round suddenly, staring at Robert. ‘Are her and Jerome Simmons still going out?’
Robert shook his head slowly. ‘Don’t think so.’ He didn’t have the perverse interest in the students’ love lives that a lot of the staff had.
The two men watched each other, Robert fighting hard against his instinct to tell Les that, for the first time in his professional life, he was terrified of walking through that classroom door because of Jerome Simmons. That up until this moment he’d always felt that the job needed him as much as he needed the job, but now he was starting to believe he was in the wrong place and that somebody else should be doing this. He wasn’t sure he wanted Les knowing this because this would make him, Robert, just like every other teacher in Ellington and the kids already knew… were already onto him with the instinct of a pack, systematically rooting out weakness because children can’t abide weakness.
‘What’s he doing?’ he said instead to distract Les, pointing at Simba, the caretaker, who was out on the flat roof just below.
‘What’s that?’ Les turned slowly away from him to stare at Simba. ‘Ohpigeons. He’s been trying to perfect some sort of acid glue he can paint on the roof to discourage them from landing.’ Les let out another sigh. ‘The acid in the glue burns their feet off if they do landapparently.’
Robert didn’t comment on this.
The murmur from the classroom behind them was getting louder and interspersed with distinct screams, shrieks and rhythmically choreographed abusive exchanges. Robert recognised Jerome’s voice and knew his face had changed and knew that when Les turned round he wouldn’t be able to disguise the fear his face was full of.
So he turned quickly to the window again, staring out over Simba’s bent back and the edge of the roof to the only piece of green in sight; an inexplicable mound about the same shape as a small Iron-Age fort that was known among staff and students alike simply as ‘The Clump’. Beyond The Clump was the Esso garage the council had sold the school’s last playing field to and, beyond that, the Elephant and Castle.
Local press abounded with mythical promises of regeneration, but at the moment the panorama on offer was a four-lane super-roundabout with exits leading to some of London’s most destitute spinal cordsand a Soviet-era shopping centre, which was quite a feat of urban planning in a country that had never had its own Soviet era.
A couple of boyspossibly studentspushed a moped across the empty playground.
‘In the beginning,’ Les said suddenly, ‘somebody somewhere had a vision, that’s all.’ He sounded elegiacas though he’d decided right then and there that he’d lived one life too many. He clapped Robert warmly, forcefully, on the shoulder. ‘You’ll be all right.’
Robert nodded.
Then, with Les’s footsteps still ringing down the corridor, he walked into the classroom and the crescendoing, unavoidable, ‘Yo, sir! Yo, sir!’ There in front of him was the mob.
His eyes hit Ellie because she was sitting at the front of the class to the right-hand side of his desk and was the first thing in his line of vision. He hadn’t meant to look at her in particular, and certainly never intended to look at Jerome after that. But he didand saw that Jerome had seen him looking at Ellie.
He’d been caught off guard, but then it had been so long since anybody had looked at him in the way Ellie had when he walked into the room. When was the last time he’d caused anybody so much pleasure, simply by walking through a door?
Her eyes opened so wide he felt he could have just carried on walking straight into them.
He came to a halt behind the desk, pressing his fists down hard into the surface. This was wrong. The wrong way to think and the wrong direction to start walking inno matter how wide her eyes opened.
Chapter 6
At No. 22 Prendergast Road, Margery was on all fours crying with rage over Ivan’s bowl, which was full of corned beef. She’d seen it, smelt it and tasted itand it was definitely corned beef.
When Ivan came creeping back into the kitchen, his shoulder blades rolling smoothly as he sniffed at the floor around his bowl, Margery screamed at him, still sobbing, ‘Bugger off, just bugger off.’ She elbowed the white cat away, anger replacing fear, but Ivan came back, nonplussed by the elbow in his flankand gave the corned beef a few aggressive licks.
Margery staggered to her feet and kicked him across the kitchen.
After bouncing off the fridge, he landed with a whine, paused, licked at a back paw then padded quietly into the hallway where he sat and waited, letting his posture insinuate that his dignity, at least, was intact.
Panting, Margery slammed the kitchen door shut, decanted the corned beef from Ivan’s bowl into a plastic mixing bowl and, taking a pair of tweezers from her handbag, which she always kept within close range, started to painstakingly pick Ivan’s hairs out of the corned beef.
Chapter 7
Jessica Palmer was inside No. 8 Beulah Hill doing a viewing with a young, top-of-the-range couple when her mobile rang. She didn’t usually take calls during viewingsnot unless it was Ellie or the nurserybut she took this one because it was Kate Hunter, and Kate was meant to be picking Arthur up from nursery and taking him to Swim School. In fact, Kate Hunter was her childcare lifeline.
The top-of-the-range young couple drifted upstairs.
Beulah Hill, like the rest of the streets in the postcode, had gone from destitute to up-and-coming to boom as generations of Irish and Jamaicans started selling up and moving out, and young couples started selling flats in Battersea, Putney and Clapham and moving in; taking out extra-large mortgages in order to pay for the reinstallation of sash windows the Irish and Jamaicans had replaced with uPVC double glazing. Once the sash windows were reinstalled, they moved onto the floors, replacing carpet with solid wood flooring. Sea green and lilac bathroom suites were ripped out, along with any dividing wallsto create living spaces that allowed lifestyles to circulate more freely. Some of the houseslike the McRaes’got to feature on TV makeover programmes.
No. 8 had yet to be made over.
‘Kate?’ Jessica whispered into the phone.
‘Hi, Jessica?’
‘Hi…’
‘Why are you whispering?’
‘I’m doing a viewing on Beulah Hill.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I said, I’m doing a viewing on Beulah Hill.’ There was a pause. ‘Kate?’
‘Beulah Hill? You’re there at the moment? Has anyone put an offer in yet?’
‘No.’ Jessica scanned the green shag-pile carpet and green leather three-piece. The light coming through the double layers of net at the windows made the room seem as though it was under water, and had the effect of making Jesus, with his arms outstretched, executed in oils and framed on the wall above the mantlelook as if he was floating.
‘Why were you asking?’ she joked. Then, before Kate had time to respond to this, said, ‘Is it still okay for you to take the boys swimming tonight and pick them up?’ She tried not to sound desperate, knowing from experience how off-putting desperation was but, since Peter’s death, she seemed to be perpetually desperate, and perpetually having to conceal it was draining.
When Kate didn’t respond to this, she prompted her, ‘The boys? Swimming?’ and waited.
‘Swimming?’ Kate
’s voice sounded vague and preoccupied.
‘You were going to take the boys to Swim School after nursery and then I was going to pick Arthur up from yours around six?’
Silence, as Kate rapidly processed these facts as if she was hearing them for the first time, which she wasn’t. ‘Fineyes, that’s fine. Robert’s going to pick the boys up from swimming.’ She made a mental note to remind Robert.
Jessica, trying not to cry with relief, missed what Kate said next. ‘What’s that?’
‘I said maybe I am interested.’
‘In what?’
‘Taking a look at Beulah Hill.’
‘You’re thinking of moving?’
‘Possibly.’ Kate’s only appointment that morning had been a teenage schizophrenic, so she’d spent most of her time after printing off a map of the St Anthony’s catchment area, as well as two copies of the appeal form, on Rightmove. By the time she discovered that the only property with at least three bedrooms under seven hundred thousand and within the catchment area was No. 8 Beulah Hill, a dull thumping sensation had started somewhere just behind her left temple, and she knew that at some point that day she would have a migraine.
‘But you’ve got a lovely house.’
In the silence that followed, Kate realised that Jessica was waiting for some sort of explanation. ‘We were thinking of buying something abroad,’ she liedanother lie. ‘Maybe downscaling in London, cashing in on some capital and getting somewhere in Franceto take the kids in the holidays.’
‘Well, how much were you thinking of spending?’ Jessica said, thinking that at least the Hunters would be around in the term-time still. Kate was the only person she knew who ever offered to help with Arthur.
‘Around four fifty?’
‘This is on for four eighty.’
