Kitabı oku: «The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls»
The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls
Sarah May
For Gabriel
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Four Virgins Go Fruit Picking
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Suburban Satire
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
The Poker Party
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
The Burwood Four
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Suburban Satyr
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Peace, Plenty and…Babies
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for Sarah May’s novels:
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
four virgins go fruit picking
—summer—
1
Summer was shimmering and at its height as Tom Henderson drove his piebald red Volkswagen out of town with three seventeen-year-old virgins in the back. It was Ruth who—sitting in the middle between Vicky and Saskia—suggested fruit picking.
Tom said he’d drive them.
He had just about enough petrol to get there and back.
The windows were down and there was a Led Zeppelin CD playing that jumped when they went over potholes or when they braked suddenly like Tom was braking now, at a set of red lights. As soon as the car stopped, the 32ºC with humidity that had been forecast regained its full weight.
‘Jump them,’ Vicky Henderson ordered her brother. ‘It’s, like, B-Movie empty—there’s nobody around.’
‘The lights are red.’ Tom exhaled, uninterested.
‘This is fucking unbearable.’ Vicky groaned and turned irritably to Saskia, slumped against the opposite door, her face obscured by her hair, which had settled there when the car stopped. ‘Why are you wearing jeans? Aren’t you like melting?’
Saskia, high, was staring through the open doors of the Baptist Church they’d drawn level with—at an outsize flower display looming white in the shade of the vestibule. She looked down slowly at her denimclad legs and shrugged.
‘Yeah—’
The lights changed at last. They left the Baptist Church behind and a hot breeze started blowing through the car again.
There were a lot of churches in Burwood. In fact, they still built churches in Burwood. The newest was completed only six months ago—at around the same time as the North Heath housing estate, whose population it had been built to serve. There was a pub next to the church, clad in the same bright sandstone, serving western-style BBQ ribs to the hungry faithful.
‘And you’re tanned,’ Vicky carried on. She hadn’t finished with Saskia. ‘If I had your legs I wouldn’t be putting them in jeans.’
Saskia sighed and continued to stare out the open window, her hair blowing around her face. She was thinking about the south of France where she’d spent most of July; thinking in particular about her father lying drunk and untidy on a poolside sun lounger while she tried to drag a yellow and white striped umbrella over to him so he wouldn’t get burnt. That’s how she spent most of her time: stopping her father getting burnt—one way or another. At least in France she’d had Ruth for company when Richard Greaves lost consciousness, which he did most afternoons.
She turned her head to look at Ruth, who was sitting beside her, and her eyes caught Tom’s in the rear view mirror. Last summer Saskia had been in love with Tom. She kept a darkly detailed diary noting his every movement, gesture and look, and stole things from his bedroom that she never gave back—a ball of elastic bands, a pair of worn sports socks, a Smurf pencil sharpener, a Radio Mercury sticker, and a library copy of a D.H. Lawrence book he’d spilt aftershave over.
This summer she didn’t love him any more.
Catching her eye now, in the rear-view mirror, Tom felt bad about the hours his university girlfriend Ali and he spent talking and laughing about Saskia’s ‘hingeless passion’—a phrase coined by Ali—and the way he’d just handed Saskia up to Ali, who could be cruel.
‘How’s Ali?’ Saskia said suddenly.
‘She’s in India,’ Vicky put in. ‘Her parents think Tom and her are too close.’
‘And what does Tom think?’ Ruth asked suddenly—loudly, out of shyness.
‘Tom doesn’t think.’
‘Shut up, Vick—’
Ruth kept her eyes on Tom—taking in his thighs, throat and wrists—and wondered what it would be like to sleep with him as the red Volkswagen left behind the retail parks where the good people of Burwood bought pet food and hot tubs, hitting a leggy stretch of road lined by garages, off licences, discount bedding stores, pubs that welcomed families and sold salad in kegs, Indian restaurants—one called Curry Nights had been made infamous a couple of years ago when an Alsatian carcass was found in one of their bins.
‘I went to school there,’ Ruth said, as they passed the primary school where she’d had her hand driven onto a rusty nail by another girl and had to go to hospital to get a tetanus jab.
Nobody said anything.
It was too hot to worry about somebody else’s memories.
They passed the St Catherine’s Hospice and the flat above it rumoured to house Burwood’s only prostitute. Local press refused to comment on the prostitute or the Alsatian carcass in the bins at Curry Nights, and it was the News of the World, in the end, that covered both stories. Burwood also appeared—that same week—in the Financial Times, featuring as one of the ten towns in the UK where men lived longest.
Burwood ranked number four.
Burwood was a good place to live.
From the air, the town looked like an untidy circle surrounded by a band of green separating it from London to the north and Brighton to the south. In other words, it had a lot more going for it than most places viewed via satellite.
Burwood long pre-dated its Domesday Book entry, and was now flourishing and thriving its way into the twenty-first century with an all-pervasive aura of stability and permanence that breathed promise to the world-weary. So saying, Burwood had its fair share of anarchists—the most notable being a poet who, two hundred years ago, published political tracts and distributed them from a hot-air balloon, unsettling everyone before eloping with an underage girl called Harriet. In cases such as this, however, it was town council policy to disinherit—no matter how famous their anarchic sons and daughters later became.
The Hendersons, hugely influenced by the Financial Times article—and the fact that the town’s historic centre already felt familiar, having been used by the BBC on a regular basis to film Jane Austen adaptations—were by no means the first immigrés, and wouldn’t be the last.
Burwood ended now abruptly on its eastern side, which was also its most picturesque. They’d driven through all the rings of the town’s life from its premedieval centre to the helplessly conservative, sprawling suburban villas built with optimism after the Second World War, and with disproportionately small windows behind which a whole generation came to terms with the horrors of war and the legacy of those horrors…perennial-filled borders, trimmed lawns and terrifying stretches of leisure time spent struggling to define the word ‘peace’. They’d passed through the industrial estates and were, finally, beyond the reaches of the executive satellite estates—by products of the post-1986 housing boom. Burwood’s last house was an old brick cottage shared by two octogenarian brothers who had been Conscientious Objectors in the last world war.
The red Volkswagen turned off the main road into open country, following a lane that sank beneath banks of hedge and forest where there was sudden shade and the sound of water before rising again in order to cross fading green and yellow fields. The forest was beech and ash and had once stretched from coast to coast, covering the land Burwood now stood on. Deepest darkest forest had been replaced by deepest darkest suburbia, where modern man and woman sought refuge, as their forest-dwelling ancestors had sought it in the forest. Like them, they mistook the shade-dappled depths for a place of innocence where a simple life could be led.
‘I hope they have raspberries,’ Ruth said, to nobody in particular. ‘I told mum I’d get raspberries.’
Vicky stared at her. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a conversation about anything —let alone raspberries—with her mother, Sylvia Henderson.
‘Isn’t Grace working at Martha’s Farm?’ Saskia said after a while, trying to pin her hair back with her arm.
Ruth watched Tom suck in his left cheek and move his hands on the steering wheel.
‘I thought she already had a job?’ Vicky said, irritated that she didn’t already know this.
‘Yeah, but this is like a holiday job.’ Saskia let go of her hair again.
‘Why didn’t she say?’
‘Probably thought you already knew.’
‘Well, I didn’t.’ Vicky turned to Ruth. ‘Did you know?’
Ruth shrugged. ‘I kind of lose count of the number of jobs Grace does.’
‘Yeah, well, some people’s parents can’t actually afford to send their children to university so they have to pay for it themselves,’ Tom said from the front.
Ruth, upset, looked away.
‘There are loads of grants and stuff for people like Grace,’ Vicky said, defensive. Upsetting Ruth was her territory.
‘People like Grace?’ Tom cut in, angry.
Ignoring this, Vicky carried on, ‘In fact, she’ll probably be better off by the time she finishes—not like the rest of us, up to our eyes in student-loan debt. Cambridge are offering her a scholarship anyway, so what’s the big deal.’
Saskia said slowly, ‘I thought she was going for that NASA one at Yale?’
Vicky, no longer interested, didn’t respond.
Grace was one of their group, and Vicky was tyrannical about having up-to-date information on all members. She considered the group—her group—a profound social achievement given that she’d only started at Burwood Girls’ in Year 11. First she successfully penetrated an already-established group, then she amputated the excess, re-forming a splinter cell comprising core members only: Grace Cummings, Saskia Greaves and Ruth Dent. She put her rapid rise down to not only getting them into Tom’s university parties but even some London ones as well. Who else on all Satan’s earth could have got them into Lilly Allen’s brother’s eighteenth for fuck’s sake?
They turned right off the lane into Martha’s Fruit Farm and tried looking for a space in the field full of cars. In the end they parked at the top near a ridge of trees where there was a sandpit.
Ruth, worried, said, ‘D’you think they’ll have raspberries?’
‘Will you shut up about raspberries.’ Vicky pulled her skirt off the back of her legs, which were covered in an imprint of the car’s upholstery.
‘I only mentioned them once.’
‘You mentioned them like about a hundred times,’ Vicky said, moving off between the rows of parked cars, the air heavy with the scent of fruit on the turn.
They straggled slowly down the field whose early summer ruts had now been baked hard by the sun. By the time they got to the weighing-in hut at the bottom, all three girls had linked arms, their heads resting on each other’s shoulders.
2
Tom stayed in the car with the door open and lit another joint, sucking on it slowly while watching a black Labrador play in the sandpit just beyond the bonnet of the car. Through the windscreen he could see Burwood in the distance, but there was no resonance for him in the view. The Hendersons moved down from London two years ago and he’d only lived there a couple of months before leaving for university. He’d felt more at home in Bolivia than he ever had in Burwood.
An elderly couple—fruit picking veterans—returned to their car, a purple Nissan parked next to Tom’s. Their determined faces were sweating under matching white sun hats with ‘Crete’ embroidered above the visors, and as they lined up their baskets of fruit on the roof of the car, he saw that they were still wearing the surgical gloves they’d bought with them to pick fruit in, now stained purple.
He finished the joint then got out of the car and, without bothering to lock it, followed the others down the field.
There was a crowd of people round the weighing-in shed and a woman inside was barking at them to get into a queue, but people were too hot and laden with fruit to comply.
As the crowd shuffled forward, broke up then reformed, Tom caught sight, briefly, of his old black and silver racing bike leaning against the side of the shed; the one he told his mum he’d sold to Grace last summer—only he never sold it to her, he gave it to her.
He remembered clearly riding it round to Grace’s house and Grace answering the door in a dressing gown, holding one of her sister Dixie’s dolls. Up until then he’d never realised Burwood even had a council estate. He’d rung the doorbell and while he waited, staring at a patch of wall next to the drainpipe where a lump of pebble-dash had fallen off, he’d decided that he was going to give Grace the bike.
Grace, in her dressing gown, stared at him.
He prompted her. ‘The bike?’
She carried on staring at him before switching her gaze to the bike. ‘The bike—shit. Sorry. Just a minute.’ She disappeared back indoors.
Too late, Tom realised that she was getting the forty pounds they’d talked about on the phone the day before.
‘Wait—’ he called out, wanting to follow her, but just then there was the slap of wet feet on pavement and Grace’s nine-year-old sister, Dixie, appeared round the side of the house leaving a trail of wet footprints behind her. She stood on the corner in a pink polka dot bikini with bows at the side, water glistening on her legs, watching him through a pair of goggles and wearing a smile that was missing two bottom teeth.
They took to each other immediately.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Tom.’ He held out his hand and Dixie shook it wetly in hers.
‘Yeah, but who are you?’
‘A friend of your sister’s.’
‘Like a boyfriend?’
‘No, just a friend.’
Dixie contemplated him. ‘I never saw you before.’ She paused. ‘I’m having a sleepover tonight.’
Before Tom had time to respond to this, Grace reappeared at the front door and Dixie ran off up the side passage and into the back garden again.
‘Forty pounds, right?’ Grace handed him an envelope.
‘Leave it,’ Tom said, embarrassed.
‘You said forty pounds—on the phone.’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘What?’
Grace looked angry.
‘It doesn’t matter—about the money. I mean, just take the bike. I changed my mind about the money.’
‘What made you change your mind?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You said forty pounds. On the phone.’
‘Yeah, but—’
This had gone on and the sun had moved round the side of the house until it was filling the front garden.
Now Tom saw her, standing over by the ice cream van with her back to him. While he was watching, she stood up straight, laughing. She looked like she was having a good day. He should go before she saw him.
‘Hey, Tom.’ She’d seen him—was smiling straight at him.
‘Hey.’
She came across the grass in her flip-flops and a bottle-green T-shirt that said ‘Martha’s Crew’. Grace didn’t look like she belonged to anyone’s crew—let alone Martha’s. Tom watched the boy in the ice cream van watching Grace.
‘What brings you out here?’
He hadn’t seen her for a year, and this wasn’t the kind of thing—a year ago—she would have said.
‘I’m my sister’s chauffeur.’
‘She’s here?’
‘Somewhere.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘Saskia—Ruth.’
‘I didn’t know they were back from France.’
Tom didn’t say anything.
She squinted across at the fields laid out below the weighing-in hut, trying to pick out her friends.
He saw that her fingertips were stained purple.
‘You’re not picking anything?’ she said.
‘No—’
For some reason this made her smile.
‘How’s the bike doing?’ he asked
‘The bike’s doing fine. Only one puncture so far.’
‘You should change the tyres to Kevlar—they won’t ever puncture.’
‘Okay—’
Was she laughing at him?
‘They sound expensive though—and I still owe you for the bike.’
‘Fuck that,’ he said, genuinely angry.
She was about to say something when a voice started yelling, ‘Grace—Grace,’ from inside the hut.
‘Shit—I better get back.’ She disappeared into the crowd round the weighing-in hut and didn’t look back.
Tom and the boy in the ice cream van were left staring at each other. The afternoon felt suddenly pointless—as though it had been going on for too long.
3
Vicky followed Ruth to the far end of the raspberry field, whose boundary was marked by a narrow strip of woodland unable to cast any shade because the sun was too high in the sky and falling on it at the wrong angle. The earth was hard and tufted and, with a serious headache beginning due to the day’s dope diet, Vicky kept losing her footing. She picked the biggest raspberry she could find, put it in her mouth then spat it out again.
Ruth stopped picking. ‘You okay?’
‘Tastes funny.’ Vicky wiped her mouth. ‘Do they taste funny to you?’
Ruth took one of the raspberries out of her punnet. ‘Tastes fine. Maybe you just got a bad one.’
They carried on picking, the heat close around them.
‘Where did Sas go?’
‘Redcurrants.’
Vicky, bored, had stopped picking and was now just trailing after Ruth. ‘Redcurrants?’
‘Said she’d never picked redcurrants before.’
‘What d’you do with redcurrants?’
Ruth continued to make her way up the row, too intent on picking to respond to this.
Behind her, Vicky said, ‘Matt was meant to phone at twelve today. He’s been on holiday and he said he’d phone when his plane landed, but he never did. No message—nothing. I’m meant to be going to a party with him this weekend.’
She looked up instinctively as a plane went overhead, nosing down towards Gatwick. ‘I can’t believe you and Sas didn’t meet anybody in France—like, anybody at all.’
Ruth had stopped picking and was staring at something in the distance, her shoulders so taut with concentration that Vicky had one of her brief, habitual anxiety attacks that their GP at Park Surgery refused to prescribe her Diazepam for.
It was the plane—the plane that flew over just then; it had crashed. She just knew it. Any minute now there’d be smoke and debris and the field would be full of soft, torn, bloodied body parts. Any minute now the silence would end and she’d see freshly twisted wreckage and freshly dead people. What if Matt’s flight had been delayed? What if Matt was on that plane?
The two blues she took out of her pocket now and put into her mouth had, until recently, belonged to her mother, Sylvia, whose anxiety attacks their GP at Park Surgery had been happy to prescribe Diazepam for.
She’d been taking Sylvia’s prescription Diazepam since she was fifteen—when the burglary nightmares first started. It was the same every night—she’d wake up around two, convinced she heard someone crossing the gravel drive, walking up the side of the house and letting themselves in through the patio doors. She’d lie in bed flushed with fear and barely breathing, listening to the intruder’s footsteps on the stairs, and waiting for her bedroom door handle to start turning. That’s when she’d take the Valium, put on her i-pod, and curl up under the duvet—whatever the weather.
‘What is it?’ she tried not to scream.
Ruth, distracted, said, ‘Does that look like Mr Sutton to you?’
‘Mr Sutton?’ Vicky’s eyes grazed the fields spread out around them, still looking for smoke, still sniffing the air for blood.
‘Over there.’ Ruth pointed.
Vicky felt herself start to calm down. The sky was clear—no smoke. The plane that had gone overhead had landed safely.
‘I’m sure that’s him.’
Vicky looked. Ruth was right. In the next field was their Art teacher, Mr Sutton—whose home address they’d taken from confidential staff files so they could send an anonymous Valentine’s card.
Mr Sutton was the youngest male member of staff at Burwood Girls’, and taught art under an overwhelming barrage of oestrogen that manifested itself in the various totemic gifts he was recipient of—from an envelope full of pubic hair to a photograph of a pair of bare breasts.
‘What’s he doing here?’
‘Picking fruit—like everybody else.’
‘Shit—look at me.’
‘He’s two fields away, Vick.’
‘Yeah, but we can see him. So are we going over—saying hello?’
Ruth was blushing. Confident—and often caustically funny—with family and close friends, she was pathologically shy with most other people.
‘Come on—you know you’ve got a thing about him.’
‘I know, but—’
‘And we haven’t seen him for ages.’
Ruth shrugged and turned away. ‘Wait—he’s with someone.’
‘Who?’
‘He’s talking to someone.’
As Vicky continued to stare, the gradient of the field, which sloped gently downwards, seemed suddenly much steeper. The next minute she grabbed hold instinctively of one of the raspberry canes as the entire field lurched out from under her feet.
She’d never had such an intense or sudden attack of vertigo before.
‘Vick?’ Ruth said, turning to her, worried. ‘What happened? You looked like you were about to black out.’
‘Vertigo—I just took some Valium.’
‘What colour?’
‘Blue.’
‘How many?’
‘Two—like, 20mg or something. Don’t look at me like that.’ Vicky broke off. ‘It’s Saskia!’
‘What?’
‘The person Mr Sutton’s talking to—it’s Saskia.’
4
Still high, Saskia drifted down between the rows of netted redcurrant bushes able to feel every crevice and ridge beneath the thin soles of the sandals she’d bought at a market in the south of France. Mel and Tony were pre-divorce friends of her father’s. Richard Greaves had known Mel since university and the Greaves stayed in their villa at St Julien most Julys. During the first week, before Ruth arrived, Mel drove Saskia to the local market—a girls only trip—and for a whole two hours she’d tried to be Saskia’s mother, then she got bored with the idea and moved onto something else. Before she got bored she bought Saskia the sandals she was now wearing—had worn all summer, in fact—and a bracelet made of bottle tops that African immigrants were selling on blankets, which Ruth had admired when they picked her up from the airport in Montpellier. Saskia had been so pleased to see her she’d almost given it to her before changing her mind and deciding to keep it.
A plane passed overhead. She watched its shadow move solidly over the ground and redcurrant bushes, her eyes following it as it ran over the rows—until she saw Mr Sutton. Was that Mr Sutton from school—picking redcurrants just like her, approximately five rows away? She wasn’t convinced it was. Saskia believed in UFOs; she believed in ghosts, parallel universes and monsters like the Yeti that evolution had stranded, and sometimes she got confused and saw things out of the corner of her eye that never quite materialised when she really concentrated.
No—Mr Sutton was definitely there. He was waving at her.
Saskia didn’t wave back, she just carried on staring.
He hesitated then made his way over to her row.
‘Hey,’ he said, pleased to see her. Saskia was one of a handful of pupils going on to study art at degree level, and he kept this coterie of girls close.
Saskia finally emerged from what her grandmother used to refer to as one of her ‘brown studies’—lapses of attention that had induced her mother to have her tested for epilepsy as a child—and smiled back at Mr Sutton.
He was wearing shorts and a yellow polo shirt. The effect was stodgy and preppy and just not him at all. Her dad wore polo shirts; they’d been bought for him by his ex-wife, who was also Saskia’s mother, because he never knew what to wear when he wasn’t wearing a suit. Now her mother was dressing a different man, and although her dad made an effort—post-divorce—not to wear the polo shirts, he also made the mistake of not throwing them away. He came across them when he was looking for something to decorate in and after that they once more became fixtures in his casual wardrobe even though they were covered in paint stains and smelt of white spirit.
For this reason, although she didn’t know it, Saskia had always associated polo shirts with helplessness, and seeing Mr Sutton wearing a yellow one confused her because he’d never struck her as helpless before. It was like somebody had got to him before he could get to himself, and it made her feel sorry for him.
He must have read something of what she was thinking in her eyes then because he paused, suddenly awkward. ‘What are you picking?’
‘Redcurrants.’
He held up his punnet. ‘Me too.’
She nodded, gesturing to the redcurrant field they were standing in the middle of. ‘Yeah—’
‘I can’t believe I just said that.’
She nodded again. ‘Yeah—’
He laughed. ‘So—how’s it going?’
‘Fine. How’s your summer been?’
He had no idea how his summer had been. ‘I went to South Africa.’
She didn’t ask him who he went with—if anybody. ‘How was it?’
‘I can’t remember.’
Saskia laughed.
He twisted his neck like it might be stiff. ‘What about you? What have you been up to all summer?’
‘I went to the south of France with my dad.’
‘Get any painting done?’
She shook her head. ‘I had some ideas—made a few sketches.’
‘I’d like to see them.’
She nodded, aware that she had no intention of showing him the sketches she made after seeing Tony and Mel in the kitchen that night when she’d got up for some water. ‘We were staying with some friends of dad’s,’ she blurted out, trying to distract herself from the memory of Mel bent over the marble kitchen surface, her breasts pushed into a pile, her hands gripping the edge of it, and Tony behind her. It had looked fierce and ugly with about as much choreography involved as taking a crap, and now she was scared of the whole thing. ‘They had a pool and stuff.’
‘Sounds great.’
‘Yeah—the first couple of weeks were, then my dad and his friend Tony sort of remembered that they never really got on and that my dad’s always fancied his wife.’ Saskia heard herself saying it and couldn’t believe she was saying it, but couldn’t stop herself. ‘And Tony, who’s been holed up in paradise for about two years too long, was like drunk the whole time and then dad got drunk and then they started rowing.’ She paused for breath, horrified. She hadn’t told anybody this—not even Ruth, who’d actually been there—so why was she telling Mr Sutton in the middle of a field of redcurrants?
He was staring at her, about to say something when suddenly there was a woman standing next to him wearing black wraparound sunglasses that made her look like a beetle. She’d appeared from nowhere, had her hand on his arm, and was smiling at them both.
Behind the glasses, Saskia recognised Ms Webster who’d taught her Physics in Year 9. For a moment she wondered what on earth Ms Webster—who also coached the Burwood Girls’ Netball A Team—was doing at Martha’s Farm as well. Then she realised: Ms Webster was here because Mr Sutton was here; Ms Webster was here with Mr Sutton.
He’d been to South Africa with Ms Webster. They’d lain on the beach together, swam in the sea together, and had sex in a hotel—and other places—together. Now the yellow polo shirt—Ms Webster was wearing the same one—made sense.
‘Typical,’ Ms Webster said loudly, triumphantly, holding a basket full of redcurrants up in the air.
Saskia stared at her, her mouth hanging open awkwardly.
‘So much for his contribution to jam making.’
Saskia didn’t know what to say—she’d never had a jam-making conversation before.
‘I just saw Grace as well,’ Ms Webster carried on.
‘Grace works here,’ Saskia said without thinking. It sounded mean—when all she’d meant to do was say something because she couldn’t carry on standing there with her mouth hanging silently open, feeling like she’d just got drunk in high heels.
‘Well—we’d better be going,’ Ms Webster said, her hand still on Mr Sutton’s arm, turning him round, steering him away. ‘Enjoy the rest of your holiday.’
‘I will.’ Saskia was jabbing the front of her sandal repetitively against a ridge of earth and now the crust cracked and crumbled.
Mr Sutton turned back towards her. ‘I’m in and out of school the next couple of weeks—if you’ve got anything you’re working on or want to show me before the beginning of term.’
‘Thanks—’
Another tug on the arm and he was led away again, only to break free a second time.
‘Oh—and I hope that’s not permanent.’
Saskia stared at him. She had no idea what he was talking about.
‘Your neck. The scorpion.’
Her hand went to her neck. ‘No, it’s—no.’
He smiled, paused, then turned and walked away with Ms Webster.
Saskia kept her hand on her neck, covering the temporary tattoo that had come free with one of her music magazines. Her eyes followed Mr Sutton and Ms Webster in their matching polo shirts and South African sun tans all the way to the weighing-in hut.
They were arguing.
By the time Vicky and Ruth reached Saskia, standing inert still in the field of redcurrants, the black Peugeot convertible belonging to Ms Webster had left Martha’s Farm in a loose trail of dust. Neither the driver, Ms Webster, or the passenger, Mr Sutton, looked like they were going home to make jam.
‘Did you speak to him?’ Vicky asked, breathless still from the Valium-induced attack of vertigo.
Saskia nodded vacantly.
‘And?’
‘What?’
‘What did he say?’ Vicky was beginning to lose patience.
Saskia was about to mention his reference to her tattoo when she decided not to. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Sas—’ Vicky insisted.
‘He went to South Africa—on holiday.’
‘South Africa?’
Saskia sighed, her hands dropping to her sides. ‘With Ms Webster.’
‘Webster?’ Vicky screamed, the screams echoing across the fields. ‘No—fucking—way. Are you sure?’
‘She was standing right here in front of me, Vick. They were wearing matching clothes.’
‘Like—how matching?’
‘Yellow polo shirts, shorts and Birkenstocks.’
‘That is so depressing. How come we didn’t know anything about this? How did she get to him?’
‘End of last term,’ Ruth said.
Vicky turned on her. ‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘I don’t know that—I’m just guessing. Staff drinks and stuff.’
‘Staff drinks and stuff? They went to South Africa together, Ruth—they’re practically married.’ She paused. ‘Webster. Why didn’t I see this coming?’
‘Webster’s okay,’ Ruth ventured then paused. ‘Isn’t she?’
‘Webster’s not okay, Ruth. She’s like the wrong side of healthy, like too healthy, like under all that lycra she wears she’s got no genitals or something.’
Nobody said anything.
Saskia’s hand remained over the temporary scorpion tattoo as they trailed slowly over to the weighing-in hut, expecting to find Grace there—only to be told by the boy in the ice cream van that she’d already gone.
‘She had to leave early—something about a puncture. I offered to take her home in the van, but—’ His eyes moved curiously over all three of them as Vicky emptied her raspberries into Ruth’s already full container and stepped away from the hut, crushing the ones that fell beneath her sandals. She stood, bored and dizzy, aware of the ice cream boy’s eyes on her, but too overwhelmed by the thought of Mr Sutton and Ms Webster to react.
The ice cream boy stared at the red spots in the dust and tried hard to think of something to say. He was still trying as the girls walked back up the field towards Tom’s car.
‘Webster’s totally wrong for Sutton,’ Vicky started up again then broke off, staring into Saskia’s punnet. ‘Why did you pick redcurrants?’
Saskia stared at the redcurrants, trying to remember.
‘I wanted to paint them. Remember that triptych I did of the rotting quince?’
‘No.’
‘I was thinking about doing another one with redcurrants.’
‘Morbid.’
‘It’s only fruit.’
They got to the top of the field where Tom was sitting in the sandpit, banging on an old plastic cup with a lolly stick and making a child with blond curls laugh.
‘Looks like I’ve got to go, little man,’ he said when the girls arrived. ‘See you around.’
Vicky glanced at the toddler without interest as Tom handed him the plastic cup and stick and watched him try to reproduce the sound he’d been making.
‘Did you manage to meet up with Grace?’ Tom asked as they got back in the car.
‘No—she already left—had a puncture or something. We’ll probably catch up with her on the road. Can we get some windows down?’
5
They caught up with Grace about a mile down the lane where it left the fields and sank into forest.
Tom slowed the car when he saw her up ahead on the opposite side of the lane, pushing her bike.
‘Isn’t that your bike?’ Vicky said, staring.
‘I sold it.’ Tom threw the rest of the joint he was smoking out the window.
‘When?’
‘Last summer.’
‘To Grace?’
‘You know I did.’
They pulled up alongside her.
Vicky leant out the back of the car and gave a slow, exaggerated wave.
‘You should have said,’ Tom called out.
‘About what?’ Grace called back.
‘Needing a lift.’
‘I don’t need a lift.’ She smiled at him.
Saskia and Vicky were leaning out the car, waving.
‘You’ve got a puncture.’
‘I know, but I didn’t want to leave the bike.’
‘Come on, get in,’ Tom said, ‘I’ll put the bike on the roof rack.’
Without waiting for a response, he drove past her and carried on for a couple of hundred yards, until he got to a passing place where he pulled in, got out the car and jogged back to where Grace was.
‘There’s some rope—’ he called back to Vicky, who was hanging out the window still, watching him ‘—in the boot.’
She pulled her arms and head back into the car and let her head flop against the back seat.
‘Are you getting the rope out the boot?’ Ruth asked.
‘No—I’m too depressed about Sutton and Webster.’
‘I’ll get it.’ Ruth got out of the car, stretching herself. She poked at the junk in the boot, looking for the rope.
Through the open hatchback, she saw Vicky climb between the two front seats and get into the driver’s. The next minute, Vicky started the car up and put it into gear. It jolted forward then stalled, the boot flapping.
Tom broke into a run back towards the car as the engine started up again and a basketball rolled out of the back onto the lane.
Saskia got quickly out of the car and joined Ruth as the engine started to grate.
‘Vicky!’ Tom yelled, sprinting now, his footsteps loud on the tarmac. ‘You’re flooding the engine.’
Grace was wheeling her bike towards Saskia, Ruth and the car when there was a series of sharp splintering cracks in the woods to their left and two deer broke suddenly out of the dense line of trees, passing so close their flanks grazed Saskia and Ruth before they swerved, hooves slipping on the hot road surface, stopping Tom in his tracks, vaulting the basketball then disappearing into the woods on their right.
They were gone, leaving behind them an unsettling silence that hadn’t been there before.
Tom, shaking, hadn’t moved. ‘Shit—’
‘I never saw deer so close before,’ Ruth said, breathless. ‘I mean, I felt them—they actually touched me.’
Grace dropped her bike on the side of the road and went up to Tom. ‘You okay? Something must have scared them—in the woods.’
Vicky got out the car and walked towards them. ‘What was that?’
‘Deer,’ Grace said.
‘They passed so close, they actually touched me,’ Ruth said again.
Ignoring Ruth, Vicky said to Tom, ‘I think you’re out of petrol.’
‘Out of petrol? You just flooded the fucking engine.’ He was angry with himself for being so shaken by the deer.
‘I didn’t flood the engine—you’re out of fucking petrol.’ Vicky turned and started to walk off up the lane.
‘Where are you going?’ Tom called out after her.
‘Home.’
‘How?’
‘The bus—there’s a stop at the top of the lane on the main road.’
‘So you’re just going to leave my car in the middle of the fucking road?’
‘It’s your fucking car.’ Vicky carried on walking.
Tom didn’t say anything. He picked up the basketball and started to bounce it rhythmically on the road.
Ruth, Saskia and Grace hesitated, uncertain how the argument between brother and sister had started or how it had got to this point. Vicky had already disappeared round the bend and out of sight.
After a while, Ruth shut the boot. ‘You want help pushing it or something?’
‘No point—we won’t get it started in second without a hill. I’ll come back later with dad and pick up some petrol on the way.’
Just then the ice cream van from Martha’s Farm came up behind them, sounding its horn. The boy inside leant out of the window. ‘What happened?’
‘The engine’s flooded or something,’ Saskia said, diplomatic.
Tom carried on bouncing the ball.
The boy in the ice cream van turned to Grace. ‘They caught up with you then.’
‘Yeah.’
‘D’you want a lift?’
‘My bike.’
‘We’ll get that in the back no trouble.’
Grace hesitated and glanced at Tom, who kept his eyes on the ball and didn’t look up.
‘I’ve got room for one more,’ the boy said, pleased.
‘I don’t mind getting the bus,’ Ruth put in.
Saskia drifted slowly towards the ice cream van. ‘You sure?’
Ruth nodded as Grace turned back to Tom. ‘How are you getting home?’ she asked over the soft rhythmic beat of the ball on the road.
‘We’ll get the bus—it’s fine,’ Ruth said again, trying not to look at Tom, who didn’t comment on this.
Saskia got up into the front of the van, excited. ‘Can we put the music on?’
The boy didn’t respond—he was too busy watching Grace standing beside the van with her bike.
Tom stopped bouncing the basketball.
‘I think I’ll walk back.’ He paused, looking at Grace. ‘You feel like walking with me?’
She didn’t say anything; within seconds was standing beside him.
‘What about your bike?’ the boy said, quietly devastated, and trying not to sound frantic.
Tom turned to Grace. ‘We can lock it to the roof rack and I’ll take it home with me when I come back for the car later. You’ve got a lock for it?’
Ruth’s momentary decisiveness was gone, and its departure left her looking stranded.
‘Ruth,’ Saskia called out from the ice cream van, and the next minute, Ruth was climbing up beside her as Tom started to bounce the basketball again.
The van pulled away, the boy glancing in the rear view mirror at Grace.
Grace and Tom stood in the road and watched the van disappear, a canned version of Au Clair de la Lune starting up the moment it was out of sight.
At the sound of the music, they smiled suddenly at each other.
Feeling immediately lighter, Tom kicked the ball hard, into the forest.
‘Why did you do that?’
He shrugged, still smiling, then lifted her bike onto the roof of the car. Grace chained it to the roof rack.
After checking the doors to make sure they were locked, he jumped down into the ditch the deer had vaulted earlier.
‘You coming?’ He watched her, waiting for her to change her mind.
‘Which way are you going?’
‘Shortcut.’
She jumped down into the ditch beside him. ‘I’m wearing flip-flops.’
‘You’re not in a hurry for anything?’
She shook her head.
‘So we’ll go slow.’
She hesitated then followed him into the woods.
suburban satire
—autumn—
6
Bill Henderson woke at 5:15 just like he did every morning, including weekends, only at the weekend he didn’t have to get up. Today wasn’t a weekend, and the world was even more silent than usual due to the heavy fog October had pushed over Burwood during the night. Bill didn’t know about the fog yet, but the silence was so intense he woke with the sound of a low pitched hum in his ears that he thought was the under-floor heating they’d had installed downstairs until he remembered that the central heating wasn’t programmed to come on until seven because Vicky said the sound of it woke her up. It was the same sort of humming he heard Scuba diving that summer because of water pressure.
Still puzzled, he executed the neat sideways roll he’d perfected over the years, which enabled him to vacate the marital bed in the early hours without waking Sylvia. Landing softly on the carpet in a stress position, he moved silently out the room. He then crept downstairs to the loo where he peed in the dark because switching the light on triggered the extractor fan.
They’d been in the house over two years, but in the dark mornings, half awake, the layout sometimes caught him out. He aimed his pee as best he could in the glow from the sitting room sidelights that were on timer switches and programmed to come on at five in the morning. Not flushing the chain was also part of the morning’s silent routine, one that contributed to the sometimes overwhelming feeling in Bill that he had in fact died without realising it, and was haunting rather than living in his home.
He padded through to the kitchen, put the cooker hood light on and poured himself a glass of milk, which he drank standing in front of the fridge where there was a diary kept up with magnets that had survival maxims for life as a woman written over them—that Sylvia, drunk, read out to him like he hadn’t heard them a million times already.
He checked the diary every morning, with a fledgling curiosity at this early hour for the insight it gave him into the lives lived by his wife and daughter during the week. There in front of him was a list of cryptic biro scrawls that held the key to everything happening in this house he’d paid for and that he felt like no more than a squatter in. It occurred to him that all he would ever need to surmise about these two people—one to whom he was bound because of a religious ceremony, and the other through genes—was contained here in this diary.
Today’s list was long:
5km / hair @12 / POKER / flowers—Panino’s / Tel. Tom re. nxt w/e—Ali coming?
Then, in caps, with an asterisk either side:
* POKER PARTY *
Then, in lower case and without asterisk:
rem. Bill
It was strange seeing his own name written in the diary. Puzzled, but not particularly concerned, he put his empty glass down on the surface and stared around the kitchen. He was forgetting something. He’d stood in this exact spot the night before and Sylvia had asked him to do something first thing in the morning when he got up; something important, and now he couldn’t remember.
He went through to the sitting room, still trying to recall what it was, and attempted to operate the pulleys that opened the curtains—curtains that had cost them more than a month’s mortgage payment.
They swung heavily apart, not responding to his touch as they did Sylvia’s, and there he was all over again in the pyjama bottoms and T-shirt he wore to bed. The T-shirt infuriated Sylvia, who couldn’t understand why he refused to wear both parts of the two-part sets she bought him. Even when he explained that he didn’t like to end his day in the same way he began it by doing up a row of buttons. She still didn’t understand.
He enjoyed observing himself hovering above the lawn’s dark outline while simultaneously suspended in a fragile replica of the sitting room.
This morning he looked like he was standing in a cloud and it took him a while to realise that nothing untoward had happened to the outside world; it was only fog.
He waved at himself and smiled, then, suddenly embarrassed, went back upstairs to the spare bedroom where he kept his minimal wardrobe of mostly suits, clothes to play golf in and a couple of outfits he wore when they went out socially as a family. These were the outfits he stood in while listening to people whose names he forgot as soon as they told him, talking about operations they’d had or cars they drove. Sylvia’s people.
He dressed without looking at himself in the mirror, shaved in the downstairs bathroom where he kept his shaving soap and cologne, then left the house, tiptoeing across the gravel that marked the threshold between him and the dawning day.
Two Fridays a month he went up to London to do a day’s auditing at Pinnacle Insurance’s Head Office.
Today was one of those Fridays.
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