by Judy Astley
She wondered where Oliver was, right now. It was nearly eight here in London. In Australia it would be anything from about eight to ten hours ahead of her. He’d be asleep. He might be asleep with a girl somewhere, in a hostel, in her home, on a beach, whatever. Or he might be by himself, camping under a backpacker’s moon out in the bush. She wished he’d come back: she wasn’t making much of a job of taking over being the eldest. And it really was like a job: she was supposed to be there for Zoe and not to give her parents a ton of grief and she was failing horribly. Lucky Oliver had escaped and was free: absolutely untroubled by responsibility and the need to please anyone but himself. They were all like that, all the males she came across in her life at the moment, even her dad who probably should have more on his mind than most.
If Oliver was here now, she thought, what would he tell her to do? As if by round-the-earth telepathy she could hear his voice: ‘Go home Tash, you silly sod, just go home.’ She turned round and walked back towards the square. School started again in the morning. There wasn’t any point making things worse by not being there.
‘… as if the house shrinks in proportion to the length of the school holidays. Every room has at least two abandoned pairs of shoes in it, as if staking a claim to the space on behalf of their owners. Trainers, like metal coat hangers, breed if they’re left to hang about too long. Zoe’s homework takes up no space at all because it is so rarely allowed out of her bag …’
Paula would have to lump it, Jess thought as she typed. No way was she going to write about being burgled by her daughter’s boyfriend in a flurry of merry quips as if the whole thing was no more traumatic than having an unused scratchcard fall out of your pocket. Natasha had stormed off to bed the night before, with Jess conscious of her humiliation at having had to ring the bell and be let in. Paula, when she’d told her what had happened, had mostly been concerned that the burglar wasn’t making his steady way along the Grove (as if he was collecting the Red Cross envelopes) on his way to liberating Eddy’s guitar collection, which was all he possessed by way of a pension fund.
‘Do you think I should move in with him?’ Paula then asked anxiously, as if her constant overnight presence was all Eddy needed to protect him from the teenage thief.
‘Well, only if you really want to,’ Jess told her. ‘And has he asked you to? I mean, isn’t it a bit soon?’
‘Oh, he hasn’t exactly asked. But he doesn’t like me going home, you know,’ here her voice dropped to a near whisper, ‘after. I have to go back to the flat most nights, to feed Miu-Miu and do her litter tray.’ Jess imagined Eddy having to wake up from a deep post-coital sleep to do the good-manners thing of saying good night, possibly (for he was quite old-fashioned) calling for a taxi and accompanying Paula down to the front door. No wonder he’d rather she stayed overnight – he was not of an age to relish interrupted sleep.
‘But what about your flat? It’s so exactly the way you like it.’ Jess thought of the clutter-free white space in Kensington, the slender glass vases containing scrupulously exotic single blooms and the creamy-beige suede sofa, exactly the same macaroon shade as the soft little ears of Paula’s cat. The jewel-and-citrus colours of the walls in Eddy’s house, on the other hand, made your eyes sting. She couldn’t at all imagine Paula relaxed on the pink paisley sofa, gin and tonic in hand, with Eddy’s massive ginger tomcat kneading holes into her Joseph leather trousers. Nor could she imagine her attempting to cook in his haphazard kitchen. From what she could remember, from a party the previous Bonfire Night, his cavernous lime green American fridge contained nothing but beer and prepacked, brick-sized slabs of Red Leicester cheese in readiness to be sandwiched between the thickest possible pre-sliced white bread. Paula was more of a pesto and pasta girl, with Parmesan of translucent slivers. If she ate a cheese sandwich it would have been ordered in from Pret A Manger and contain the best Brie, rocket, organic cherry tomatoes and some quality dressing of fine olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Still, maybe it was true what they said about opposites.
‘I’d rent the flat out,’ Paula went on. ‘To be honest, from the Grove it’s just as easy to get in to the office. And besides, perhaps it’s time I went in a bit less often. There are other things besides work. I know Matt’s just realized that, though I don’t want to have to wait to be sacked to find out.’
Oliver, when Jess checked her e-mails, was now full of the delights of Sydney.
‘This place is just awesome – like all that stuff you see on telly is really here. Crossed over the famous bridge at dawn this morning on the way in and there’s the Opera House, looking like something out of a movie. I was stoked. Staying in King’s Cross area sharing a dormie with three guys who have to get up at five for work and none of us sleep till three anyway. This is a party city …’
In a reversal of the traditional postcard, Jess said to herself, ‘Wish I was there.’ The bliss of escape … Quite impossible though, she thought briskly as she shut down the computer. Besides, imagine leaving the house clear for Tom to wander back in at his leisure and extract any little valuables he hadn’t had time or carrying capacity to liberate the first time.
George wished he hadn’t looked. The Sierra’s boot was crammed with what could only be described as light electrical goods, which were so obviously stolen that the boy might as well have written ‘Swag’ in the dust on the paintwork. The back seat held the bigger stuff, a couple of TVs and a computer monitor covered with a blanket, all in this unlocked car. Tom clearly trusted his fellow citizens far more than they could trust him. George hadn’t seen him yet today, though no doubt he’d be turning up to shift the stuff to somewhere where he could exchange it for cash. He put the boot lid down as soundlessly as he could, so as not to attract the curiosity of Val who was fitting cardboard collars round the bases of her young cauliflower plants as a defence against cabbage root fly. He’d taken one of the smaller items from the car boot and now went into the shed to collect his reading glasses. There was one of those little gold printed name-and-address labels stuck on the side of the Walkman, the sort you ordered by the thousand. He’d seen them before at Jess’s place. He put the glasses on and read the label: ‘Zoe Maria Nelson’ it said, followed by her address.
Natasha and Claire spent the morning break in the cloakroom, lying flat out on the benches like a couple of tramps dozing in the park. Natasha had enough to be unhappy about, she thought, she didn’t need Claire giving her a hard time as well.
‘Maybe your parents are right,’ was Claire’s verdict when Natasha told her all that had happened. ‘I mean, do you really want to go out with a criminal?’
‘You don’t get it, do you.’ Natasha sat up and stared down at her so-called best friend. ‘There’s more to him than just the criminal bit. I didn’t even know he was when I started liking him.’
‘Yeah, but you know now,’ Claire pointed out, leaving Natasha feeling as if she’d been set adrift. Nobody at all understood. She hated this school, hated its poncy assumption that everyone, really, wanted only to be nice and firmly middle-class and stuffed to the eyeballs with academic qualifications. There wasn’t one girl in the school who could imagine a post A-level life that didn’t include going to university at their mummy and daddy’s expense. Not one of them, she thought with a certain amount of arrogance, would dream of saying, ‘Oh I’m going to leave at sixteen and be a hairdresser (or a plumber or whatever).’ This was a sausage machine for the professional classes; they’d all emerge with their grades more intact than their virginity, full of useless information about oxbow lakes and the causes of the American War of Independence but completely ignorant of anything that might be of practical use. Not like Tom, she thought. He might get by on other people’s stuff but at least he could survive, like an animal, on his own. None of this lot, she thought with increasing exaggeration as she watched Claire re-applying her mascara, could so much as make themselves a sandwich: they thought they came in cellophane packaging from Marks & Spencer.
‘I’
ve had enough of this place. I’m going to leave as soon as I’m sixteen,’ she told Claire.
Claire turned away from the mirror and looked, at last, interested. ‘Oh? Good idea. I think the sixth-form college would be much more fun. I might join you.’
Natasha laughed. ‘You know Claire, there’s more to life than being stuffed with useless facts. When I say leave I mean exactly that.’ She looked out of the window towards the high gates at the entrance. They reminded her of prison. Something out of place caught her attention and she screwed up her eyes. There was someone leaning on the ironwork, someone whose body shape looked thrillingly familiar. Adrenalin flooded in, and she hoped Claire wouldn’t notice how flushed she suddenly was. Claire, though, had moved on to perfecting her eyeliner. Natasha smiled at her by way of the mirror and said, ‘In fact I think I’ll go now. Why wait?’
‘What do you think the upper age limit is for joining the police?’ Matt leaned back on Eddy’s pink sofa, stretched his legs out in front of him and gazed down at the length of his body. It looked strong enough, firm enough to him. If it needed a bit of toning, that wouldn’t be a problem. And they were short of good cops, weren’t they? Most of the ones he’d seen lately looked about twelve. They must be in need of more mature ones who could trot around with the youngsters and help them be taken a bit more seriously.
‘You can’t join the pigs man,’ Eddy slugged some more beer and took a deep toke on the joint. ‘I mean you’re the wrong sort. You’d give them a good name.’
‘Do you know, they’ve offered us victim support? We can get some sort of cop-counselling because of the burglary. You get offered it for everything apparently, even if it’s just your bike being nicked from outside the pub.’
‘You mean, just cos they’ve been nice to you, you want to join them?’ Wilf was puzzled.
‘Of course I’d only want to do it part-time. And not weekends. And possibly not summer either.’
‘Or Christmas, and definitely not New Year’s Eve,’ Wilf added. ‘You don’t want to deal with all the drunks.’
‘And not traffic control. Because I don’t care about traffic being controlled at all.’ Matt passed the joint on to Eddy. ‘In fact maybe I’ll think of something else.’
‘Good idea.’ Eddy nodded slowly and for a long time. ‘You don’t want to go arresting people for this either,’ he waved the joint towards Matt, ‘I mean you’d end up dobbing your mates in.’
‘No I wouldn’t.’ Matt was indignant. Eddy’s head shook from side to side this time, with the same deliberate slowness. ‘You would you know, you’d get corrupted, you’d end up as one of them. It happens.’
‘Sad isn’t it?’ Wilf said.
‘Tragic,’ they agreed.
Fifteen
Natasha’s form tutor had one of those voices that seemed to assume all replies to her questions would be out and out lies. Jess could feel something rising where she assumed human hackles would be as the woman spoke to her on the phone, asking, ‘Would you tell me what good reason Natasha had for being absent yesterday, during the time following on from morning break?’
No ‘please’ or apology for disturbing her, Jess noted. She fought down an urge to say ‘And what’s the magic word?’ guaranteed to irritate the woman into reserving perhaps an unnecessarily dire punishment for the wayward Natasha. Instead, caught without a handy whopper ready-prepared for her daughter’s defence, she admitted, ‘Er, no, not offhand, I couldn’t.’ Pompous cow, she thought, as she tried at the same time to assimilate the gist of what the woman was getting at. So Natasha had skived off, which wasn’t terrific news, and certainly from Jess’s point of view was potentially hugely worrying. But the form tutor made it sound as if she was the first girl in the school’s history ever to have done it and that only dire failure and disgrace could follow.
‘… obviously not something we tolerate at Julia Perry …’ the disembodied voice continued.
‘Obviously,’ Jess concurred. ‘But she should be in school now, perhaps you could find her and try asking her where she was?’ Surely the woman could have done that in the first place, she thought, unless of course, Natasha, now, wasn’t there.
‘Oh we have. She said she’d had a migraine.’ Jess wanted to cut in smartly with ‘Well there you are then’, but the tutor continued, ‘But she hadn’t reported to the school nurse and she didn’t turn up to any lessons after the morning break. In future, if Natasha needs to go home for any reason, she must have a note, or at the very least, a phone call from a parent.’
‘Did she mention to you that we’ve been burgled, or that she has been having rather a difficult time at home lately?’ Jess rallied, conscious that this might come across as a series of excuses but that the school perhaps should know that there might be more to Tash than simple unprovoked naughtiness.
‘She hasn’t said anything.’ There was a wariness in the tone: ‘difficulties at home’ too often led to divorce and a cessation of the family’s fee-paying ability.
‘Has anyone asked? I remember your prospectus does emphasize a certain amount of pastoral care.’
There was a whistling intake of breath down the line. ‘If a girl has family problems, obviously we do all we can to accommodate any special needs, but the fact remains Natasha left the premises in flagrant contravention of the rules …’
Jess, still fuming at the woman’s tone, returned to her computer after the phone call. She couldn’t really understand why she’d had to be involved and rather wished no-one had told her. Natasha might have walked out of school through hatred of maths and simply mooched around the shops all day. Or she might have gone off somewhere with Tom. It would be hard to work out how she’d have contacted him, though: presumably he was on the run somewhere and if the phone he’d dropped at the bottom of the stairs was the only number she had for him, then Jess couldn’t see how they’d got together. Whatever she’d abandoned the school day for, Natasha had apparently been sentenced to two weeks ‘on report’, which meant being signed in and out of all lessons, along with having to spend all her breaks and lunchtimes wasting time on a chair outside the staffroom. At least, Jess thought, that would give her plenty of time to get her homework done.
With the idea of selecting some of the best of her articles to put together for a potential book, Jess carried the i-Book to the kitchen table and started looking at her past year’s work. It was, she thought, a bit like reading old diaries, though in this case the mood was perpetually light and her articles lacked any of the self-pitying grumbling that diaries tended to contain. The tone of the articles seemed to come from a distant, enviably carefree age. There was the chirpy account of Zoe’s week at Pony Club camp (hilarious, had been Paula’s and the readers’ verdict), a piece about the delights of having six massive, perpetually hungry to the point of midnight-fridge-scavenging, friends of Oliver’s to stay (without warning) on their way back from Glastonbury, and something of a fill-in, when she’d run short of ideas, about parties of men let loose in French Channel port supermarkets.
As she sorted through them, arranging the pieces in some kind of order so that she could make a Year in the Life theme for the book, it crossed her mind that Nelson’s Column, in its current happy-dappy form, really was coming to a natural end. It wasn’t going to be possible, or even desirable, any more, she realized, to use her own family as material. Natasha had been right; the girls (and Oliver) were entitled to privacy. She could hardly believe now that she’d thought it would be a major career catastrophe when Paula had suggested running the column down over the next few months, and encouraged Jess in the direction of a different kind of writing. Right now, with all that had happened, she was wondering what on earth she’d have done if Paula hadn’t thought of it.
‘OK, take a look at this.’ Matthew dashed in through the back door, opened a large carrier bag and tipped a pile of fabric swatches onto the table. ‘What do you think?’ He was beaming, clearly anticipating a hugely positive response.
‘Ooh s
uch lovely colours, but what am I looking for? Something for curtains, a dress, cushion covers, what?’ Jess picked through them. She recognized a couple of classic Liberty Tana lawn flower prints that reminded her of party dresses she’d bought for the girls when they were little. There were some strips of gorgeous dewy-textured silk in enough brilliant colours to run up a new Technicolor dreamcoat for Joseph, plus a larger length of purple satin.
‘I rather fancied the satin myself, so I thought I’d get an extra big bit.’ Matthew picked it up and smoothed it against his face. ‘Mmm, feels sexy. And that colour, gloriously royal and perfectly papal. I could live with that. Not that I would be, of course.’ He folded the fabric carefully and went to switch on the kettle. ‘Coffee?’
‘Yes please. So what are these for? What do you mean about not living with it?’
‘Because I’ll be dead.’ Matthew gave an ‘isn’t that obvious?’ look. ‘It’s a few ideas for possible coffin linings. Thought I’d run a few samples past the lads, see what they think.’
