Two Years After ; Friends Who Lie ; No More Secrets

by Paul J. Teague

  Isobel walked into the communal kitchen accompanied by Emma. Their faces were red. They’d only had to climb two flights of stairs to get there, but they looked as if they’d been halfway across the city rather than along to the local corner shop.

  ‘Booze!’ they shouted together, as if they’d rehearsed it beforehand. Livin’ la Vida Loca came on the radio, which had been playing quietly in the background. Katy leaned over to turn it up and the room burst into a spontaneous show as the six teenagers performed their best dance moves while the beans began to stick to the bottom of the saucepan.

  Another student called Neil popped his head around the kitchen door, saw what was going on and thought better of it. He’d be eating late that night, or resort to the chippy. There was no way he was cooking in there with that bunch of wankers messing about. Besides, he’d tried his luck with Katy at a recent Student Union disco and she’d rejected him. Nicely, she wasn’t a bitch or anything like that. But he was still reeling from having plucked up the courage and been given a knockback. It would take him some time before he recovered his dignity and tried again with another woman. Not all students tumble into bed with each other. For people like Neil, it was something they were obliged to watch from the sidelines.

  ‘These beans are disgusting, Nathan,’ said Emma, swigging a plastic cup filled to the brim with cheap white wine.

  ‘It’s because this wine doesn’t complement my fine menu. Everybody knows you drink red wine with baked beans.’

  Emma flicked a bean off the side of her plate towards him, and it hit him directly on the forehead.

  ‘You cow!’ He lined up three of the crispy beans which had been scraped off the bottom of the saucepan and flicked them: one, two, three – a barrage of military aggression, embroiling a neighbouring country by the name of Elijah. Grinning at Katy, he joined in the food fight, which swiftly escalated into a full-blown global conflict. Within five minutes the kitchen table was splattered with food debris.

  ‘Shit, we’ll lose our deposits if we don’t clear up.’

  ‘It’s alright for you, rich boy. Mummy and Daddy will pay,’ said Sarah, never one to miss a pot-shot. ‘Some of us will have to sign a Faustian pact with the Student Loans Company just to be able to keep eating shit like this.’

  ‘Either way, we’ll need to clean up,’ replied Elijah, ever the peacemaker. He knew that Sarah was only trying to get a rise, and if nobody took the bait she’d be laughing and joking with the rest of them in no time at all.

  ‘It’s not my hall of residence, so no skin off my nose,’ Nathan chipped in.

  Isobel moved to the kitchen door, blocking it.

  ‘Nobody leaves here until my deposit money is safe,’ she said, concerned that they were about to evacuate the area and leave it in a state. She could be really fussy about the cleaning.

  Elijah crouched down, reached into the cupboard and brought out some rather sparse cleaning supplies.

  ‘Right. Emma and Izzy, you clear the table. Sarah and Nathan take the floor, and Katy and I will wipe the walls. And when we’re done, Mummy and Daddy will treat you all to fish and chips. You deserve it, some of you have never cleaned a kitchen before.’

  In that single exchange, Elijah demonstrated why he was such a popular member of the group. Not only had he placed Sarah with Nathan – he knew that she fancied him, she was almost eating him alive – but he’d also put Emma and Izzy together, and so managed to win a coup for himself and Katy.

  They weren’t sleeping together yet, and there was much conjecture among the group about whether they were an official item or not. They’d done the sensible thing. Katy was now on the pill and they’d got pretty close to full-on sex. He’d even met her parents over Easter. But he really liked her, he was her first, he wasn’t going to rush her. Being a gentleman was all well and good, but his balls felt like they were about to explode. He hoped it wouldn’t be much longer.

  Elijah was generous with his money too. He knew that people like Sarah and Katy had bugger-all. They didn’t get financial top-ups, their parents couldn’t afford to make up their money, so it would be inevitable that they’d take out student loans. A treat like fish and chips made all the difference when you were broke. In spite of his privileged background, he understood that, and he helped whenever he could. He didn’t want to provoke Sarah’s more militant tendencies, but she’d accepted his offer without protest. Even political idealists have to eat.

  Half an hour later, the room was filled with the aroma of fish. The wine was flowing, the kitchen clean – or passable enough not to get a warning from the warden – and the food was good.

  ‘You know, we should go away together in the summer holidays. We could get a holiday cottage or a lodge. It wouldn’t have to cost a fortune.’

  Nathan looked at the faces around the table, waiting to see what reaction he’d get. He’d been thinking about it for some time. He’d got his eye on someone, and it would be an opportunity to get a bit closer, although he wasn’t certain that his interest was being reciprocated.

  ‘That’s a brilliant idea,’ Katy chimed in first. ‘We’re not going to see each other for weeks over the summer. It’s going to drive me mad having to spend it all at home. Let’s do it!’

  She leaned in towards Elijah as she spoke. He was taking a puff of his asthma inhaler – the combination of booze and cleaning products had made him wheezy. There were still several weeks to go before they all went their separate ways, but already she couldn’t face the idea of having to be apart from him. They lived at different ends of the planet, or so it had seemed at the time.

  Izzy chimed in.

  ‘I can’t do it. I’m working at my mum’s shop over the summer. She thinks she might have to close if we don’t have a busier season this year. I can’t let her down.’

  ‘Why don’t we stay up near you?’ Emma suggested. ‘You can come and visit. Scotland is the perfect place to go on holiday. We could even camp up there if it’s too expensive to get a house. What do you think, Izzy?’

  She nodded in assent. It would work like that – in fact it would liven up her summer. Since her dad had left, she knew how precarious the village shop had become. He was generous enough with her, but a right bastard to her mum, and now she was at uni there was no obligation for him to support her anymore. Izzy feared it was already too late for the Bonnie Prince Charlie Highland Store.

  It wasn’t long before the fish and chips had been demolished and a rough plan drawn up for the long summer vacation. Elijah knew the area well, as did Isobel. They were going to look at a place near Spean Bridge, which was close enough to Fort William but still out in the wilds. There was a cinema at Inverness where they could get their fix of city life, rural Scotland style, if they were going stir crazy out in the wilds.

  Elijah and Katy were in charge of booking and decided to pick up brochures from the travel agent’s the next day. Elijah had resolved to subsidise the rental for everybody – he’d make sure that nobody was financially embarrassed. They’d never know. He’d divide up the costs and present them with a bill which was at least seventy-five pounds light. He wanted this to happen, his parents were loaded – embarrassingly so, as it had turned out when he began to mix with a greater variety of people at uni. He would do his bit to spread the wealth about.

  Katy was delighted that they were going into town together the next day. She’d taken the prerequisite number of contraceptive pills to make sure that pregnancy was no longer a risk. She was feeling tiddly from the wine and hot for Elijah. It was happening that night. She’d decided it was high time she and Elijah did the deed.

  Chapter Five

  London, 2017

  Katy’s armpits were clammy and she was tired now. Who could have known that her dad had kept so much junk? She’d cried a lot that morning. She thought that she was getting there – yesterday she’d almost managed her first full day without getting choked up at the thought of his death. She’d already airbrushed into oblivion the bit about him
lying in a pool of piss when he died. She couldn’t quite cope with that, it made her indignant and she didn’t want to feel angry when she thought about her dad.

  He’d told her how proud he was of her. She could see that as she sorted through the pile of rubbish that he and her mum had saved from her childhood. There was the Christmas angel she’d made at primary school when she was five. It was her first Christmas at school and she’d been so pleased with herself. It was a toilet roll tube covered in now-browning tissue paper, with a face drawn on in crayon and a hairpiece made of cotton wool. It looked to Katy more like the Elephant Man than the Angel Gabriel, but her five-year-old self must have been delighted with it.

  Why had her mum and dad kept all that old stuff? She was surprised that her dad hadn’t thrown it out when her mum died. He’d got rid of a lot of bits and pieces then. He was angry about her cancer. Her dad had never been a man to get cross, but she’d seen real fear and fury in him when the cancer began to get aggressive. Maybe he’d needed to hang on to the memories – perhaps too much of their lives was rooted in those boxes of primary school artwork to be able to throw them away.

  Katy had hired a skip and it was now almost full, positioned on the roadside in front of Terry’s house. She’d booked a small van to take the important stuff to the storage unit. The removals men were coming over to her dad’s after clearing out her own house. She was never going back there again.

  She’d had a tip-off from work that Louis had been asking for her at reception. They’d done the data protection thing and informed him that they couldn’t pass on personal information about employees. He’d begun to kick off, of course, but they had CCTV in the reception area, and Gloria was great. She’d seen off her share of pricks in her time greeting the public and answering the phones. That and the fact that Katy had told her what was going on, so whatever yarn Louis tried to spin, they were not going to give him any clues about where she was living. This was her chance. If she could only get away on the train to Scotland, and then to Europe after that, she’d be able to could start again and reinvent her life.

  Had her mum and dad been proud of her? She was not proud of herself. Sure, she’d got her degree, moved into accountancy, progressed steadily through the endless exams and qualifications. She’d earned decent money – it never seemed to go far enough, but she was doing alright. In any case, lots of women were single at her age. That’s how it was, but she still felt she’d let them down.

  She’d never quite managed to recapture what she’d had with Elijah. They were kids, and it probably would have come to nothing anyway. After they’d starting sleeping together, they couldn’t bear the idea of being parted over the long summer break so they’d split the holiday, flitting between his house and her house, with two weeks spent with their friends at the holiday lodge.

  They’d started the holidays at her home, in her mum and dad’s council house. It was a lovely estate. Terry kept the garden looking beautiful, and they hoped they’d be able to buy the place soon.

  Katy had never been embarrassed about her life until she went to Elijah’s house. It was huge. His dad was an entrepreneur and had started investing in mobile phones – for all the good that would do him, or so Katy had thought in 1999. He’d made money on property in the past, flipping wrecks that he’d renovated: buying homes from distressed owners and then selling them on at a profit. It had got tense over dinner one evening when the penny dropped and Katy realised that Elijah’s dad was buying up homes from people like her parents, people who had bought their council homes, discovered the realities of home ownership – fluctuating mortgage rates, broken boilers and blocked pipes – and had to relinquish the houses that they’d dreamed of owning for so long when the financial realities set in.

  She and Elijah had been together for barely seven months. It had been smouldering for ages, but her thirty-seven-year-old self wondered if you could even call it a relationship at that age. Her parents loved Elijah immediately and completely. He was not snobby or judgmental in any way, and he got on well with Sue and Terry. She often wondered if Elijah was uncomfortable about his dad’s money. The irony of his girlfriend living in a council house can’t have been lost on him.

  Her dad and mum, with the confidence of a couple who’d racked up thousands of air miles in their own relationship, told Katy that he was ‘the one’ within twenty-four hours of meeting him. Katy thought she loved him too, but he was the first boy she’d slept with, and for all she knew it might only be infatuation. She had no experience to base it on, but it had felt like love at the time, and she’d never felt anything like it since.

  Katy came across a shoebox packed with photographs and began to sift through them. They were blurred and generally of a poor quality – cameras had been so bad when she was younger. They were almost embarrassing to look at these days when cameras on phones allowed even people like Katy, with no artistic skills whatsoever, to take a decent picture.

  She worked her way through the collection. Most of them you’d delete on your computer, but occasionally she’d stop at one and a wonderful memory would come back to her. Some of these photos were hers. She’d forgotten about many of them. They were taken around the time she was at uni. She’d got to a stage in her life, after graduation, when she’d asked Terry and Sue to look after the pictures for her. They were too painful for her. She’d decided to make a fresh start. That was the first of her fresh starts and she was still making them sixteen years later. The truth was, she could never move past that summer. She wasn’t sure if any of them had.

  It had seemed such a great idea at the time. That damn holiday, it ruined everything. If only she’d taken up Elijah’s dad’s offer to shack up in one of his rental houses for the summer, everything would have worked out fine. But she couldn’t do it. Sarah’s voice kept ringing in her ears, banging on about how the previous tenants had been evicted and that she and Elijah would be benefiting from somebody else’s misfortune. Even Elijah wasn’t comfortable with it, in spite of the wonderful prospect of being able to shack up together for an entire summer, rent-free.

  ‘Some tax dodge my dad has dreamed up,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be making money from it somehow.’

  Well, screw student ideals. Elijah’s dad was still alive and had made a fortune from his small chain of mobile phone stores. They’d been bought out by some massive company and he’d retired at fifty-two years of age, lucky bugger. But his son was dead, and all because they couldn’t swallow their pride and live in that bloody house for the summer.

  Katy came to the university photos. She hadn’t seen them for years. It was like a chronology of a disaster that was yet to take place. She wondered what they’d been thinking when the pictures were taken. They’d had no idea what was coming. Then, there he was – Elijah. What would he look like now? He’d no longer have those boyish looks. Katy had already noticed that gravity was fast becoming her number one enemy. But Elijah, he was a good looker. She’d seen pictures of his dad. He still had a full head of hair, and he looked good for a guy of sixty or thereabouts. It was probably all that cash.

  And then she came to the photos of the holiday. Most of them were Polaroids. The colour was dodgy, the pictures faded. Elijah had bought her the camera for her nineteenth birthday earlier in the summer. It must have cost him a fortune. The entire saga, right up to Elijah’s death, was captured in that pile of images.

  There was the sound of a horn outside. The removal guys had arrived. Katy hesitated over the Polaroids for a moment, then slipped them into her bag. She’d examine them later. This was no time for avoidance – she had to confront the past. There was a knock at the door and she got up to let the men in. This was the last time she’d ever be in her father’s house. She was closing doors, and this time they had to stay shut.

  Chapter Six

  Caledonian Sleeper, 2017

  ‘Izzy’s got back to me. I thought she’d gone into hiding.’

  ‘Good. Is she up for it?’ asked Katy,
checking her own phone for messages. There was nothing there. It was the small things like that which kept reminding her that her dad was gone. He used to text her all the time.

  ‘Yes, she’s fine, says she can’t wait.’

  ‘Tell her I’ll be sending her a friend request now she’s on Facebook – if I can remember how to do it. I can’t believe it took her so long.’

  ‘While you mention it, I want to take a look at your settings. You’re bloody useless at social media. You still haven’t sorted out your privacy settings, have you?’

  ‘Well, we – you – blocked Louis. He can’t see what I’m up to now, so I didn’t think much of it.’

  ‘What’s to stop him signing up under some other name and stalking you that way? Your profile is still open. Any old nutter can perve over you. Look, give me your laptop and I’ll do it before you go. How long have we got?’

  ‘The train boards in twenty minutes,’ said Katy, looking at the departures board. She reached into her rucksack and pulled out her laptop. She’d splashed out on a new Mac, only because it was so light and thin. She’d had a dry-run with her bag the week before and failed dismally. She’d found a great YouTube video showing how to travel light. She was now Katy Wild, owner of five pairs of undies, two bras, six pairs of socks, two T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, a light dress and a shirt. She was wearing a lightweight fleece, which had cost her way too much but was made of some super fabric which prevented sweating and could also protect her from a second Ice Age, or something like that.

  She’d bought the Mac, kept her old phone and tooled up with a couple of currency cards to make sure she could always get hold of some cash. She’d thrown in some sanitary products for good measure, congratulating herself on her Girl Guide preparedness, squeezed in a packet of plasters in case of blisters and loaded up with travel-size packs of toiletries. That was her life, jam-packed into a bag which could be carried on her back. Everything else was either in storage, in a skip, or on sale in a charity shop. Katy was amazed at how little she really needed.