by Jenny Oliver
‘Madame, are you trying to bride me?’
Amber laughed. ‘No.’ But still she held out the fifties.
‘Put the money away,’ the man said, humourless.
Julia hissed, ‘Put the money away, Amber.’
Amber put the fifties back in her purse. ‘Well what can I do?’ she said to the officer. ‘I’m not paying seven hundred and fifty euros, this is a joke.’
The officer ignored her. ‘For refusing to pay the fine, we are going to take the van, madame, and you are forbidden from driving it in this country.’
‘No,’ gasped Amber.
‘Madame, you need to get out of the van.’
‘Absolutely not.’ Amber shook her head. ‘It’s my van.’
‘You are beginning to annoy me,’ he said, looking angry.
Amber just crossed her arms and sat staunchly where she was.
The policeman glared at her. Then he paused, considered the options and with a sly smile said, ‘You have something to hide in the van?’ Then he peered in through the window at the grey blankets covering Amber’s stock.
‘Of course I don’t,’ Amber said, sitting up to look where he was looking.
Julia suddenly thought of Amber’s fake passport. For the woman called Christine Miller who looked like the Mona Lisa.
‘Maybe you do,’ said the police officer. Then he radioed something too fast for Julia to understand.
‘What’s he saying?’ Amber asked Julia, voice hushed.
‘I don’t know.’ Julia felt a slight dread creep up her spine. ‘But I don’t think it’s going to be good.’
The officer was laughing at something that was being said on the radio. Then he turned back to Amber all serious and said, ‘Madame, I am impounding your vehicle on the suspicion that you carrying stolen goods.’
‘No, you’re kidding, you can’t!’ Amber shook her head. ‘Come on, I was only speeding. I’ll pay you the fine, but you’re not having the van.’ To Julia’s surprise, Amber added, almost to herself, ‘I’ve got to find my son.’
‘Out!’ The officer opened the door.
‘No!’ said Amber, steadfast.
Just then another police car pulled up, sirens blaring, and the officer said, ‘Madame, I am arresting you—’
Julia put her hands up to her face and gasped.
‘OK! OK!’ Amber huffed. ‘OK I’m getting out.’ She made a big show of undoing her seat belt and taking the key out of the ignition. Then as she leant over and grabbed her bag she whispered to Julia, ‘Get the passport.’
‘How?’ Julia whispered back but Amber was climbing out of the van. As she did she dropped her keys, clearly trying to distract the officer so that Julia could open the glove compartment and try her best to slip the spare passport into her bag. But it was all so hasty and unplanned, that when Julia did try to get the passport out unnoticed she did it very badly and very obviously, fumbling it with nervous butterfingers.
The officer looked up. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked Julia.
Julia went bright red. ‘Just getting my passport,’ she said.
Amber closed her eyes.
The other police officers were getting out of their car, chatting as they came over to stand with the arresting officer.
The policeman clicked his fingers for Julia to hand over the passport.
Julia could see her hand trembling. If she really was her father, right now she’d turn Amber in without a second’s hesitation. She could feel her heart thundering in her chest. She didn’t know how long a French prison sentence for passport fraud was but it would be more than speeding that was for sure. She couldn’t meet Amber’s eye. She could feel the colour begin to rise up her neck as she opened the passport on the photograph of Christine Miller, taking her time pedantically flattening it out, trying to disguise the tremble in her hand.
The officer clicked his fingers again, impatient. When she gave it to him, he studied it for a second then stared at Julia. Narrowing his eyes.
Julia swallowed. Barely able to move.
The officer showed it to his pal. Who also looked at Julia.
‘Name?’ the man said.
‘Christine Miller,’ Julia replied, unable to quite believe that this was happening, that he believed the picture was of her, trying to keep her voice even.
‘Date of birth?’
Julia closed her eyes. She felt sick. She was lying to a police officer.
Julia reached up and scratched her blotchy neck, she pictured the page she had just spent precious seconds flattening. ‘Fourteenth of February,’ she said, ‘nineteen eighty-two.’
There was a pause. She could feel Amber looking straight at her. Then the officer nodded, closed the passport and handed it back to Julia. ‘Ms Miller, you need to get out of the van,’ he said. ‘My colleague will give you a lift to the station.’
‘Fine, yes,’ said Julia nodding, stumbling in her movements, overwhelmed with relief and fear and something else, a tiny flicker of excitement. Maybe even pride. Her hands shook as she tucked the passport deep into her bag.
Amber clearly couldn’t believe it. She was staring at Julia with a new-found respect.
‘And you,’ the officer said, tugging on Amber’s arm. ‘You are coming with me.’
Chapter Fourteen
The police station dominated one edge of a town square boxed in by giant plane trees. Across the road was a mini-Carrefour and a signpost up the hill for a boulangerie, a gymnasium and what looked like a picture of a viaduct. Baskets of pink geraniums hung from lampposts and there were tables on both sides of the square from two cafés. Under normal circumstances, Julia thought, it might be a nice place for a mini-break.
She sat on a bench under the dappled shade of the plane trees still coming down off the nail-biting horror of being questioned about the passport. The aftermath of fear had turned into a shivering surge of adrenaline. She wished she had her cardigan or something to wrap round her shoulders but all the clothes she owned were in a plastic bag which was in the van that was currently impounded just visible through a window in the police station, jacked up with no tyres, all their antiques scattered over the floor and the door-panels ripped off. She wondered what the friend Amber had borrowed the van off would make of the destruction. But, she supposed, that was the least of Amber’s problems, currently incarcerated behind the big white swing doors in the police station that Julia wasn’t allowed through. A long and frustrating discussion in broken English and AS-Level French with the beautiful flame-haired desk sergeant told Julia nothing about Amber’s case or how long she would be locked up. The redhead had nodded to the hard green plastic seats and said, ‘You will have to wait.’
But Julia hadn’t been able to sit still. The fake passport burning a hole in her handbag. So she had gone outside into the square. Where she now sat, on a bench, waiting.
She got her phone out and went on Instagram.
There was a story posted by Lexi. It was a video documenting the carnage of the party. Then Hamish walking in from the gym, all sweaty, and ignoring the fact she was recording him with her phone, giving her a long, wet hello kiss. Lexi pushed him away with a grin and said, ‘I’m mid-Insta-story, babe.’
Julia watched as Hamish nodded, opened the fridge and said, ‘I got two hundred views for my bench-press routine this morning. Guys, check it out!’ he added, drinking Tropicana straight from the carton. ‘Babe, a glass…’ said Lexi from behind the camera. Then it cut to Lexi at the hairdressers post-blow-dry, dressed in monochrome athleisurewear. A glass of Prosecco and a magazine next to a pair of GHDs. Her stylist behind her grinning. Julia read the caption: Sun-kissed! #newhair #lexistyle
Julia held it on pause to stare at Lexi’s hair. It looked perfect. All artful waves and glossy blonde streaks. She thought of her own hair in comparison, wishing it too was sun-kissed.
The wind blew gently and rustled the plane tree leaves like maracas. The sun flickered on her screen. On her hand, the skin on her arm, the pavement
. Probably if she could see a mirror, on her hair.
She had sun-kissed hair, she realised. Actual sun-kissed hair.
Julia thought suddenly of what Amber had said, about her mooning over Lexi’s Instagram. She felt immediately ashamed. Stupid.
She was about to click it off but her finger hovered over the button for her own Instagram page. She clicked onto her timeline. The last photo was of her in the Whistles rip-off white dress holding the cakes #partytime. The dress wasn’t as flattering as she’d hoped. Her hair was as flat as she’d feared. She scrolled down some more to older photos. A picture of all the swatches of paint she’d done in the living room #whichone? She remembered writing it, she had actually wanted one of her sixty-three followers to choose for her. A selfie with a paint roller that she remembered using to daub her face with a splodge of paint before taking it so it looked funnier, more authentic. She scrolled some more, further and further down, past the photos of the #newhouse and her and Charlie holding up a bottle of champagne her parents had brought them to celebrate, posing in front of the dreadful ear-of-corn kitchen tiles #excitingtimes.
She went back further still, past her wedding. Past the too-expensive honeymoon in Amalfi and a video of her unwrapping all the fragile bone chinaware they’d never used. Further and further until she got to pictures of her and Charlie lounging in their tiny studio flat in the eaves of a red-brick house in Acton, the first place they’d rented together. Eating popcorn, drinking tea, feet up on the coffee table. Then further back still. To the holiday in France when she was new to Instagram and treated it like her photo stream, nothing curated, just a day by day account of the cheese they ate, the gorges they canoed, the camera faces they pulled, the old bikes they cycled. All filtered to the max. There were no hashtags. There was just her life. Her plain and simple life with Charlie.
In one photo they were eating hot dogs from a little shack by the canoe-rental place, sitting under an orange umbrella, squinting from the sun. Julia had been a reluctant canoer. She had never done it before and didn’t want to look like an idiot but told Charlie it was because she didn’t want to fall in. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer and it had been one of the best mornings of her life. The water calm, the sides of the gorge high. It had been Charlie who had fallen in, much to her hilarity and his droll ambivalence. In the post-canoeing hot dog picture, she zoomed right in on their faces, on their skin, on their eyes. He looked so young. She looked so happy.
The T-shirt he was wearing was the same one he’d wanted to wear to the party before she’d made him change into the white polo shirt. Now holey and threadbare. She hadn’t recognised it. And strangely she suddenly remembered it as the same T-shirt he’d worn when she’d met him. Bright green, like he worked in a garden centre.
Julia stood up from the bench. She needed to move – delving so far back into her life made her feel a little uneasy. At how fast time passed. At how easily smiles faded. So she did a lap of the square, past the tweed suits in the window of the boutique and the waitress laying out napkins and cutlery at the café. At the far end of the square was a small fountain of cherubs and then a couple of old tables with rickety chairs where old men were playing chess, while some onlookers drank glasses of pastis. She went and watched for a while, listening to the trickle of the fountain and the angry challenges to the chess moves.
She thought of Charlie and his bright green T-shirt. The first time she’d seen it she’d been at university, late for her business studies lecture and in her mild panic she had spotted the bright green of Charlie’s T-shirt like a beacon next to an empty chair that she could slip into without drawing any more attention to herself. The door had already slammed causing the lecturer to sigh. The only interaction she and Charlie had was for him to move his jacket slightly so she wasn’t sitting on the edge of it. But about half an hour in, the lecturer said something that prompted one of a group of jocks lounging at the back to shout out in response some really clichéd TV catchphrase as a joke. The whole room sniggered at the heckle, except Julia, who frowned because she always felt sorry for the person being interrupted, she didn’t like seeing anyone made a fool of. Next to her Charlie leant over and said dryly, ‘Not funny.’ Which did make Julia laugh, more unexpectedly than anything. Especially as in her world – the jocks, being much like her brother, and her father for that matter – the norm was to automatically be impressed by these guys and their crowd-pleasing humour.
She sat next to Charlie a couple of times again after that, not every time. Their relationship was slow to progress. Once she asked him why he was studying business, whispered it while the lecturer was setting up a PowerPoint. Charlie said, ‘I don’t know really. I want to live off-grid.’
Julia had laughed. ‘Yeah but you have to do something.’
He’d shrugged.
‘Well what do you like?’ she’d asked. ‘Do you want to live off-grid because you want to be alone or because of climate change?’
Charlie frowned. ‘Not sure, maybe both.’
‘And you can’t just live off-grid. You have to get a job.’
‘Yeah,’ he’d shrugged.
‘So maybe you could work in something like renewable energy?’
He’d pondered the idea. ‘Maybe I could.’
She’d been incredulous at his lack of a plan
‘How about you?’ he’d asked. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘Something in the city,’ Julia replied, a whisper now because the slides had started.
‘What in the city?’ Charlie sounded confused.
Julia shrugged. ‘I’ve got an internship at a management consultancy in the summer,’ she said the name of the company, Charlie hadn’t heard of it, ‘And hopefully they’ll take me on again over Christmas,’ she said, hushed, trying to look like she was paying attention. ‘Eventually I want to work with food – you know, be a chef or a baker or something. Maybe own a restaurant.’
‘But?’ he’d asked, completely uninterested in the lecture.
Julia said, ‘My parents think I should get a proper job first, you know, earn some money, get a good pension and then go and do that later.’
‘Screw your parents,’ Charlie said, making a face.
Julia giggled. ‘You know I’m the only person in my family in six generations who didn’t get into Oxford?’
‘Congratulations,’ Charlie replied, dryly.
A couple of weeks later, Julia had sat down next to Charlie and one of the jocks, a guy called Ed Grainger, had walked past her on his way to the seats at the back and said, ‘Julia, still on for tonight?’
Julia had blushed, ‘Yes.’
Charlie had made a show of looking confused, then when she’d admitted she had a date with Ed, openly mocked her for her lame choice. But Julia hadn’t been able to resist Ed’s offer, he was six foot four, dark-haired, captain of the rugby team, and she was still trying to chase the dream of fitting in.
But the date had been as bad and as dull as Charlie had told her it would be. And in the morning, all Ed’s rugby housemates had jeered when she’d walked through the kitchen to the front door. She’d only learnt about their points-based score sheet when she’d sat red-faced in the lecture as one of Ed’s mates had shouted, ‘Grainger’s number five at three o’clock, people.’
Charlie had raised a condescending brow. ‘Should have stuck with me,’ he’d said. And somehow the words transformed and hung between them taking on more meaning than suddenly poor blushing Charlie had intended but pushed through the layers of perfectionism and FOMO around Julia’s heart to the sweet bit that liked baking vanilla sponge cakes and wasting time with him after lectures drinking horrible coffee. They had gone to see a movie together that night.
And they had been together since that first accidental invitation for a date. Charlie gave her a quiet liberation from the overachieving ambitions instilled in her. While she encouraged in him a sense of direction and self-belief to counter his laid-back disregard. But more than that they laughed
. And they believed in each other.
Charlie got a job in a tiny wind farm company that didn’t believe in hierarchy or office wear and suited him down to the ground. Julia got a job in the marketing department of a London restaurant group that paid badly but gave her loads of responsibility and a lot of free dinners for two where she tested the restaurants incognito. They had shit salaries and lived in their top-floor flat that was a hovel inside but out the window they were level with the trees so it felt like they lived in a forest. For a few years they brought out the best in each other. Then came the wedding and the expectation. Charlie’s inheritance, the mortgage and the house.
In the town square, one of the chess games ended and the old men packed up the board. Julia stood up from where she’d been perched against the brick wall and wandered back to her bench, the sun casting dancing shadows on the wood through the plane tree leaves. She sat down, one eye on the jail just in case Amber might appear. Then she glanced at her phone again, scrolled back through her Instagram till she got to the shots of her and Charlie moving into the house. The champagne and the dreadful tiles. They had been like kids in a sweet shop. Their eyes bigger than their pockets. Julia’s parents had pushed for her to aspire to more – her brother had recently renovated a Kensington loft apartment big enough to host the whole family. Julia got sucked in by Rightmove and estate agent spiel and Charlie went wide-eyed at renovation possibilities. And they got the house on Cedar Lane that they could just about afford the mortgage each month as long as nothing in their lives changed.
A month later Charlie’s company was bought out by a Japanese company who, while dedicated to wind power, were more dedicated to profit and they liked to see their staff in a suit.
Charlie would put on his tie like a garrotte. Julia remembered a conversation she’d had with her family one day after Charlie had come home with the news that one of his colleagues had the backing to set up a vegetable delivery start-up. He had offered Charlie a job and a seat on the board. Julia’s mother had frowned, ‘Do start-ups need a board?’ Her brother had said, ‘Every company needs a board, Mum.’ Her father had said, ‘But at this stage he’d be on the board of nothing. Could be a Monopoly board for all the money he’d make. Remind me how much your mortgage is again, Julia?’
